Culture Shock
by Echoes of Shadows
Summary: Antonio had never truly considered his rival to be a threat, until he ended up trapped for four centuries in a beat-up old lamp. Lovino had never considered his dead-end job to be worth anything, until he unexpectedly uncovered a Spanish pirate from the 1500s. Problem is, axe-wielding privateers aren't meant to end up in modern-day Rome…
1. Chapter 1

July 12, 1568

The man sprinted through the darkened cavern, the motion blowing his long red coat up in chaotic ripples behind him and his three-pointed black hat struggled to stay on his head. Strapped to his back was a large, double-bladed war axe, his favourite weapon, slamming repetitively into the knapsack slung over one shoulder. His clothes were slightly marred with dust falling from the cave's ceiling, not that they'd been particularly clean when he put them on, and his boots were clogged with mud from the damp undergrowth outside that he'd just cut his way through. A lit torch was clutched in one hand, the yellow flames barely emitting enough light for him to see where he was going as the wind of the motion battered them back and forth. Hard limestone walls swished past him as he ran, pitted with small holes where they'd been eroded by the water dripping off the roof.

His overworked lungs screamed at him to stop, but Antonio was used to the painful sensation and kept going regardless, panting hard through his open mouth in order to get desperately-needed oxygen to his muscles. He wasn't close to breaking point, though. Fast-paced, life-or-death situations were the norm to the pirate captain, and a mere half-hour or so of fevered running couldn't take too much out of him. He couldn't have much further to go anyway, and he'd be damned if he was going to give up when he was this close. The renowned treasure of Forlorn Rock was mere minutes away, if the legends were true. And he would rather sink to a cold, watery grave than see the fabled riches in the hands of his most hated rival. Captain Arthur Kirkland could only be a short distance behind him, delayed by a lucky cannon shot fired by Antonio's first mate. The two had been searching for the legend for months now, each chasing the other as they made every step forward. Now the treasure was within grasp, and the hostility between the two was at previously unknown peaks.

After another minute or so of fevered running, the cavern's low, dripping ceiling opened up into a giant underground chamber, tall stalactites falling from the ceiling and stalagmites reaching up to meet them in inadvertently clumsy pillars. A hole in the ceiling granted the room a thin beam of sunlight, just enough to see by, but casting long, ominous shadows into unexplored corners. Yet at the back of the chamber was exactly what Antonio had been expecting, what he'd spent months chasing after, what made the entire ordeal worthwhile. Piles of gold leant against the rough sandstone walls, with jewels of all the colours of the rainbow winking invitingly from amongst the countless coins, goblets, and chains. It was more than the young captain had ever seen in his life, and its sheer immensity was captivating.

The riches of kings, Antonio thought happily, dropping his torch and forgetting all thoughts of his rival as he reverently approached the treasure. He fell to his knees in front of the pile and ran his fingers across the first thing they came across, a flawless ruby, its surface like polished blood. He let its chain fall through his fingers, onto a pile of coins, their faces carved with the profile of a long-dead monarch of a long-crushed country. Next to come under scrutiny was a jewel-encrusted goblet, dusty and dented from its long isolation, but still nonetheless valuable, especially if it received a good polish. But Antonio's attention was quickly diverted by a lamp sat a few inches away, and an amused smile flickered across his face. It was like something out of an Arabian myth, like the ones that the merchants he robbed sometimes spoke about. Its surface curved gently, from the girth by the handle all the way up to the slim, graceful spout. Intricate patterns were carved into the soft metal around the base.

Curiously, he slid his fingers around the handle. It was cold to the touch, but ran smoothly across his fingers as he picked it up, almost as if it belonged in his grasp. Which, the pirate had decided, it did, along with the rest of the hoard. By pirate rules, finders were keepers, and Antonio was certainly the first person to come across this treasure in centuries, judging by the state of the cave's outside and surroundings. Arthur now had no claim to it, although he almost certainly would try fighting Antonio for it. Arthur was never the type to give up easily.

And, as if summoned by his thoughts, or perhaps the devil, swift footsteps from the entrance tunnel confirmed Arthur's approach. Antonio jumped to his feet and spun around, the handle of the lamp still dangling from the fingers of his left hand as he drew his hand backwards and produced his axe from over his shoulder. The polished twin blades glinted in the half-light, eager for the battle they were about to see, and a perfect reflection of the gleam in its owner's eyes.

Sure enough, less then five seconds later, Arthur's dust covered form appeared in the entranceway, his sharp steel sword drawn and determination written all over his face. A look which quickly vanished as the blue-coated pirate spotted Antonio in front of the treasure, to be replaced by first disbelief, then pure anger. His large eyebrows quivered, and the emerald eyes beneath them flicked around, critically analysing the room and its other occupant. He did not speak, only watched. Arthur always liked to try that before a battle; he was wont to think to try escape a situation.

Antonio merely laughed at the other's discomfort, pleased to have finally bested his rival and to see his facial expression when he did so. "Lo siento, Arthur, but you're a bit late here. That little blunder with the cannon cost you greatly, and the rules of pirating dictate that this treasure is mine. So get back to your puny ship before I run you through, sí?"

Arthur scoffed. "Rules? Pirating has no rules, you brainless wanker. Pirates become pirates to escape the confines of the law. Now get away from my treasure before I run you through." He sounded somewhat out of breath, but nonetheless annoyed.

"Can't do that," Antonio replied cheerfully, swishing his axe effortlessly through the air in a show of skill and dominance. It was a heavy weapon, but Antonio handled it like it was a toy. "I got here first."

"It seems we are at an impasse then, Carriedo," Arthur growled, opting to keep his sword low, still and controlled as opposed to Antonio's flashy demonstrations. His calmness was unnerving; usually the Englishman struggled to contain his fury. "And I am not a fan of impasses."

Antonio laughed, wishing he knew what an impasse was so that he could either agree or disagree with Arthur's words. Instead, he just decided to revert to a time-honoured pirate tool, petty insults. "You'll never beat me in battle, you caterpillar-browed idiot. The last time we duelled, you were mere inches away from being fish food. I could see the sharks below, hungry for your watery blood. Your mother is a better swordsman than you are." He brandished his axe again, ready for Arthur's retaliation.

To Antonio's surprise, Arthur neither snapped an insult back, nor charged at him with his sword raised. The blond pirate just stood there, a defiantly cocky smirk decorating his pale face. Suddenly, he sheathed his sword and turned his palms to the ceiling, blinking his calm green eyes slowly. "Perhaps you are right. And perhaps you are not. Either way, I think a sword-fight is a pointless way to end this little conflict. I think I should dispose of you in the way that I will always have you bested in."

"What, losing? Being slow? Having a stupid hat?" Antonio suggested, trying to hide his befuddlement behind a confident grin and disparaging words. Arthur was being highly confusing. Antonio didn't want to admit it, but if the Englishman was trying to psyche him out, it was working.

Arthur growled, adjusting his large crimson hat with one hand, causing one of the fluffy white feathers to fall out of place and flop over the side. "Say all the hollow insults you want, you twat. Before the night is out, that treasure will be sat in the hold of my glorious ship while you despair alone." He tensed his fingers, hands held in front of him, and closed his acid-green eyes, his thick black brows perched perilously atop them as if they were about to jump off and attack Antonio.

"Doubt that," Antonio replied, all traces of cheer now gone from his manner. Arthur was acting far too strangely for his liking – usually when the two duelled, there was little repartee and everything was decided entirely by the men's handiwork with a blade, whether Arthur's sword, or Antonio's dual-bladed axe. Clearly, Arthur had some unknown plan up his sleeve, and Antonio didn't like it one bit. He much preferred to solve all his problems with a quick blow of his beloved axe, not exchange words with his arch-enemy.

Arthur smiled, the expression almost looking like a sneer, or a smirk, like he knew far too much and had secretly had the upper hand all along. Antonio tensed and tightened his grip on the axe, dropping the lamp to the floor in favour of the stronger two-handed grip, in preparation for whatever Arthur's plan was. Suddenly, Arthur's eyes snapped open again and his mouth twitched up into a full-fledged smirk. "Oh? Rejecting the treasure, are you? I thought you liked that lamp. Don't worry, though. I'll make sure you're safe with it once my plan is through. So very safe." He resumed his tensed position and began chanting something foreboding in an incomprehensible language, his voice resonating with power. A ghostly green light radiated from him as strange symbols lit up the air as if written in smoke, dancing hypnotic patterns as the chant grew in intensity and complexity.

Ice chilled Antonio's heart as he realised too late what Arthur's plan was. Magic. As well as being a pirate, Arthur was also a feared warlock, and against magic, Antonio had lost the upper hand. With the right spell and sufficient time and preparation, Arthur could do anything – Antonio had discovered this on more than one occasion. He had to stop Arthur before his spell was complete. He braced his hands against the handle of his axe and prepared to charge.

By now, Arthur's voice seemed to be incanting in harmony with a hundred unearthly choristers, echoing of the walls of the cave and chaotically mingling with previous words. A fierce wind blew through the cavern, seeming to be emanating from Arthur along with the eerie green light, and Antonio abandoned all attempts at self-control, sprinting forward towards the navy-clad captain with only one thought in his mind: to get Arthur to stop doing whatever the hell he was trying to do. But somehow, as soon as he began to move, an unexpected force began to pull him backwards towards the treasure and further away from Arthur. Antonio struggled – oh, how he struggled – to the point where his limbs were once again screaming at him, but all to no avail. The mysterious force kept dragging him backwards, and the harder he fought, the more it tugged.

In front of him, Arthur had finished his unearthly chanting, and was standing above him with a triumphant grin on his giant-browed face. Perhaps it was the spell, perhaps he was swelling with perceived victory, but Arthur seemed so much bigger than he had before, and the cave around him was getting further and further away.

No, wait – Antonio, much to his horror, realised he was shrinking. He tried to run, tried to yell, tried to heft his axe, but he was rendered frozen and helpless as the magic took him over. Beside him, the now enormous lamp loomed above him, taller than a church spire, with Arthur's mocking laughter ringing in his ears.

And suddenly, everything went awfully black and silent.

Antonio seemed to be trapped in nothingness. For the first time in years, genuine fear pricked the pirate's heart. Where on Earth had he been sent? Could he be dead? Condemned to purgatory, or worse, hell? But Antonio quickly quashed the rising panic, knowing that there had to be a way out. His rival wouldn't have killed him like this – evidently there was some trick afoot. He didn't know what Arthur had done, or where he now was, but he knew there had to be an exit. Somewhere, somehow, there was always a way out for those clever enough to find it. Unluckily for Antonio, he wasn't exactly the sharpest sword in the armoury.

"Hello?" he called tentatively, but his only reply was his own voice echoing back at him from close by. It sounded strangely metallic. Antonio cautiously reached out his arms and jumped when they met a cold, unforgiving metal sensation, curved with a smooth, fluid gradient. When he turned back and reached the other way, he met the same result less than six feet away. With a jolt, he realised what Arthur had done to him.

He was inside the lamp.

A shocking laugh abruptly emanated from somewhere nearby, nearly scaring Antonio out of his skin, but it sounded tinny and a very long way away, and laced with barely-concealed derision and triumph. "Morning, Carriedo. I hope you like treasure, because now you're inside it, and you're not going to get out very easily. You see, I can't risk my worst enemy chasing after me, so I'm going to throw this lamp in the sea while I take the rest of my treasure back with me! Have fun waiting until you get released. Which I doubt will ever happen. So long!" And, as quickly as it had appeared, Arthur's voice disappeared, leaving Antonio trapped in a tiny, confined space with a cauldron of rage bubbling up inside him.

He lashed out at the walls with first his fists, then his axe, unleashing every curse known to him with his blows, every act directed at his most hated foe. The barrage lasted for several minutes, until the adrenaline was gone from his veins, his ears rang with the echoes of metal on metal, and his energy was all but spent. Antonio collapsed to the lamp's floor, if he could call it that, panting for breath. But, on closer inspection, all that his efforts had produced was a lot of ringing crashes and a stabbing pain in his fists. Obviously, the inside was stronger than the outside, and brute force wasn't going to get him out of his tiny prison. Was he really going to be trapped in here for years, until someone unknowingly released him? Could he even perhaps die, as there was neither food nor water? He wouldn't have put it past Arthur to be that heartless. But, either way, he had no choice but to find out for himself, or develop a plan to get out of here.

Frustratedly, regretfully, the defeated pirate captain settled back against the wall to what looked like it was going to be a very long, boring wait.

* * *

**Yup. Me again. And, as a result of my recent poll, I've got a new story for you good folks of the Internet.  
One of two, in fact. Since I've currently got more done on this one than the others, I've decided to upload it and give me a bit more motivation to write as opposed to procrastinating everything ever.  
Just as a note, rating may go up later. DLDR and all that jazz.  
**

**Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go find the bastard who's stolen my sock. **


	2. Chapter 2

September 21, Present Day.

In a quiet street on the fringes of Rome, the famed Italian capital of a thousand monuments, a squat, marble-pillared building that would have looked more at home in ancient Greece than in modern-day Rome sat tiredly at the edge of the road. Its patrons were gone for the day and the car park contained only a discarded plastic bag blowing soulfully in the wind. It was six in the evening and the place was entirely dark and silent, save for the small light in the foyer which illuminated a solo young man stood in the centre of the blue-carpeted hall.

With a yawn, the foyer's only inhabitant, clad in a creased white shirt and faded stone-grey jeans, stomped across to the pile of boxes leant against the glass front of the entrance desk. The stumpy wooden crates were stamped with blurred ink and obscured the ornate letters behind them so the sign on the desk read 'The Nati…Itali…Museum O…And Hist….' The sign was supposed to read 'The National Italian Museum of Art and History', but the young man saw nothing about the building that was either artistic or historical, and it certainly wasn't a national museum. He knew well that the place was more than it claimed to be; even the facades out front weren't any kind of Italian. It was a southern Rome tourist trap, nothing more, and it only meant anything to the museum's money-grubbing owner, and to the near-constant flow of foreign tourists that streamed in daily through its mahogany doors, eager for quasi-accurate knowledge and shiny trinkets. They knew as little about history as they did of the Italian language, but were quite happy to pay forty Euros a person to get into the place.

The boxes sat in front of the sign, on the other hand, meant hours of hard, backbreaking work on a Friday evening, a day on which he usually could cut work early if he finished his jobs fast. But no, the museum had taken on a delivery from salvage company, which had scavenged a trove of historic valuables from the seabed, and the young man was expected to take inventory of their shipment. No matter how much he glared at them. This was whether he wanted to or not, and he wasn't free to leave until the job was done.

Lovino Vargas was nineteen, an engineering student at a university nearby, who had taken to working at the museum on weekday evenings in order to help pay the bills. If he had been living by himself, he wouldn't have needed to bother, but ever since his grandfather had died the previous year, Lovino had been responsible for his school-age little brother, and needed the extra money in order to keep the two in reasonably good shape. He didn't usually mind the work, as the history often turned out to be interesting behind the repetitive cleaning of exhibits, but Friday was usually his lazy day, where he didn't have much to do and could hence go home early. Unpacking and sorting a load of pointless gimmicks wasn't how Lovino wanted to be spending his Friday nights. He'd much rather be out with his friends, but fraternal responsibility dictated otherwise.

So he turned his attention to the boxes, large, tightly packed wooden crates that they were, and tried prying off one of the lids with his fingers. To his annoyance, the rough-cut timber refused to budge a millimetre, poking his digits with the threat of splinters, and Lovino growled low in his throat. He was about to phone his boss in irritation and complain about the company's lack of provision, when he noticed the unmistakable shape of a crowbar on the floor by the desk. Damn it. It looked like he was going to have to prise the crates open manually, and he had never been built for strength. On the bright side, however, he'd just saved himself a rather embarrassing phone call.

He picked up the crowbar, tensing his muscles as he realised the thick steel was heavier than he'd anticipated. The sharp edge of one end only just fitted into the gap between the planks, and even then it took a lot of effort. Lovino had to lean his entire weight on the end just to get it to move, and it was several goes before the lid disjointed from the sides with twin cracks and splitting wood. Lovino thankfully dropped the crowbar to the floor and peered inside at the packed artefacts. It looked like it was going to be a long night.

Three mind-numbing hours later, it was some time past Lovino's usual leaving hour and he was only three-quarters of the way through the shipment. He was sat cross-legged on the floor in front of the fourth box, which was thankfully the final one, having just levered it open with the burdensome crowbar and he was panting slightly from the exertion. It wasn't particularly fair that his boss had set his skinny assistant onto a task that required almost weightlifting-standard skill, when he himself was thickset as a bull. But the end was in sight, and Lovino wanted nothing more than to have this mindless task to be over and to be able to go home and have some of the juicy tomatoes that were waiting for him in the bowl on the kitchen counter. If Feliciano hadn't eaten them already, that was.

With an exasperated sigh that did little to release his pent up tension, he shoved the lid off the box and peered inside. As he'd expected, the contents looked dismally similar to the last three boxes; a dull collection of sunk and discarded paraphernalia, scavenged off the seabed by idiots with too much time and no interest in anything useful. Most of the metal objects were badly corroded – it would be one of Lovino's jobs next week to carefully clean them all up – and things made of anything else were water-damaged almost beyond repair. Lovino didn't see the point in salvaging such worthless, ruined crap.

At random, he stuck his hand into the box and pulled out the first thing his fingers contacted, which turned out to be a pointy, blunt object that Lovino immediately recognised as a Roman gladius, a common short sword of legionnaires, and something he'd seen at least four previous times that evening in various boxes. He wasn't entirely sure how they'd ended up in the sea – to the best of his recollection, the Romans did not like being on the water much – but somehow there were lots of them in the ocean's shallower regions. It wasn't really worth much, as the museum had several even before today, but perhaps it was able to be sold at some point once it had been cleaned, probably to someone rich and gullible.

He tossed into the appropriate pile disinterestedly and returned his attention to the next object in the box, a small bundle of dusty cloths that were protecting something rather oddly-shaped. Lovino pulled off the cracked pieces of Sellotape that were holding the cloths in place, and the ragged fabric fell to the floor, revealing a dull and corroded lamp beneath them. It looked to have once been shining and golden, but a couple of centuries at the bottom of the Atlantic had done nothing for its appearance. Most of its surface was a dull shade of murky grey, and the rest was scratched awfully. There was even a small barnacle on one side. Quite honestly, it couldn't have looked worse had it been run over by a truck.

Lovino frowned and turned the lamp over in his fingers. "The hell is this? A lamp? Who am I supposed to be, Aladdin? If a fucking genie comes out of this when I clean it, I am seriously going to start breaking things." He wasn't sure why he was talking aloud to himself, but it helped somehow. Nevertheless, his task wasn't complete if the artefacts weren't on the way to being clean, save for the dreadfully corroded pieces that would need specialist work, and so he picked up the duster he'd been polishing with and drearily began to rub.

With an electric shock that jolted right up his spine, the lamp suddenly began spewing green smoke and emitting golden sparks, hissing like a kettle. Lovino dropped it in fright and scrambled backwards, wondering what in hell was going on, and beginning to fear for his life. His heart pounded a tattoo against his ribs as his breath refused to come. This couldn't be happening – he had to have passed out from exhaustion, or be hallucinating from some strange undersea chemical. Yet it all seemed too horrifically real.

His heart leapt into his throat as, in the depths of the green mist, a tall figure became visible, wearing a long coat and a strangely-shaped hat, with what looked like an axe over his shoulder. But the unusual attire was the least of Lovino's worries as the flow of mist stopped and the cloud began to dissipate, revealing the identity of the man now standing in the middle of the closed museum foyer.

XxxxX

Antonio wasn't quite sure how long he'd trapped in the lamp. He didn't have any way of measuring time, and his body clock had long been knocked out of sync by the sheer amount of siestas he'd been forced to take just to kill a bit more inevitable time. But it felt like months, and several of them at least. His crew had probably forgotten all about him, or at the very least thought him dead, and Arthur would be reigning proud over his territory, having finally seen the end of his last worthy rival. Bloodlust temporarily boiled in Antonio's veins at this abominable thought before he banished it again. Violence couldn't do anything here, not even make him feel better. He'd tried bashing through the impenetrable walls enough times during his confinement, enough times for it to have become dull and boring. Everything had become boring a long time ago, and if it wasn't for the games he'd managed to make up with the myriad of objects in his pockets and knapsack, he would have gone mad quite a while ago.

To be honest, he was quite surprised that he hadn't starved to death. In fact, he'd never been hungry or thirsty even once. It was somewhat of a relief, even though dying would have relieved the constant boredom, but there were three things Antonio wanted more than anything in his golden prison, and those were tomatoes, churros and revenge. Unfortunately, it didn't seem likely that he'd ever get any of those. He was quite probably at the bottom of the sea, as he had been since Arthur's last cheery parting some time ago.

His mind seemed to be enjoying playing games with him, though. Several times, he'd thought he was getting rescued, as there were thudding and scraping noises emanating from outside of the lamp. But nothing ever happened, and more likely than not, it probably just was a fish bumping into him on the way to its next rendezvous with a mouthful of plankton. Lately, however, he was feeling rather hopeful, as there had been some strange noises very recently, and even the faintest of voices. Voices meant no sea, and no sea meant rescue, or salvage at the very least. He wasn't sure how to get out of the lamp, even if he did get found. But it was unlikely. There were no voices at the bottom of the sea. He was almost definitely hearing things.

His thoughts were cut off by a sudden banging as the lamp got picked up – at least he thought it was being picked up – and Antonio's heart leapt. Someone was picking him up! Perhaps now he'd finally be freed, after all this time. At last, at long last, he'd breath fresh air, feel the wind on his face, taste the warmth of the sun on his skin. He'd never longed for something so hard in his life. Please, just let this be the final time he'd have to hope like this! He gripped his axe, staring hopefully at the ceiling and yearning for the sky that he imagined was beyond.

A voice echoed from somewhere, having the same otherworldly, almost tinny quality that Arthur's had had all that time ago. "The hell is this? A lamp? Who am I supposed to be, Aladdin? If a fucking genie comes out of this when I clean it, I am seriously going to start breaking things." Antonio grinned to himself. It was spoken in a very strange dialect of Italian, but whoever this was, he liked them already. They seemed feisty, and that was always a good thing to have in a crew member. Perhaps he'd recruit them, as a reward for letting him out. He returned his axe to its position over his shoulder and adjusted his hat, hoping his appearance was impressive enough to have his rescuer on their knees and begging for his alliance, as opposed to arresting him, or worse. All that was left now to do was wait.

And, just as he expected, the much-longed-for pressure applied itself to his body, growing in strength with every passing second, pulling him out of the claustrophobic darkness and out into the beautiful fresh air beyond. Green mist obscured his vision as he returned to his normal size and little gold sparks fizzled around in the edges. Fresh air, the first he'd experienced in so long, flowed into his lungs, tasting sweet and delicious. Endorphins coursed through his system as his body was ecstatic to be restored to normal, and he almost felt like giggling. Being restored to his normal size was such a great feeling.

The mist began to dissipate, revealing a curiously decorated room surrounding him. The floor was covered in some kind of short blue grass, and the walls were of no kind of wood he'd ever seen before – in fact, they didn't even look like wood. Obviously, it was owned by someone rich, though, as much of the table near the edge was fronted in glass, and there were tall windows out front, the view beyond obscured by darkness. Glass was expensive, especially if there was as much as this place had. It was clearly worth looting this building. He wondered what kind of security there was.

And, cowering in front of him in a heap on the floor, was a young man, eyes wide in shock and clearly startled speechless. He was dressed in the strangest of clothes, including an impossibly shiny pair of shoes, long trousers of some unnameable material and a shirt that was cut in a figure-flattering way that he'd never come across before. There was no denying that the guy was cute, though, with dark brown hair ruffled from recent movement and a pair of golden-brown eyes that sparkled like amber on the surface of an exotic tree. Antonio was intrigued from the instant they met his own pair. This young man was so different, and it was exciting.

The one thing that he did recognise, however, was the look of pure terror on the young man's face, mingled with disbelief. It was a look that he'd been faced with many times, usually by the unsuspecting people he was about to relieve of their valuables. They didn't know how to cope with being confronted by a pirate. He didn't blame the younger for being scared – he was, after all, being faced down by a feared pirate captain in all his glory, and doing this alone and unarmed too.

"Eh…?" the young man panted, struggling for breath and blinking hard. "What…what the actual fuck?"

Charming, Antonio thought, but he was used to the cursing. He was a pirate, after all, and a lot of his crew had needed a good mouth-soaping. But it wasn't the greeting he'd been expecting, and it confused him. He'd been expecting more of a 'don't hurt me' or a 'whoa, it's Captain Carriedo!'. It was also in the strange dialect of Italian that he'd heard earlier, the one with strange tone and unfamiliar words. Yes, he could understand Italian, just about, but the phrasing that this guy used, he'd never encountered anything like it before. Along with everything else in the peculiar room, he was really beginning to wonder what sort of strange land he'd washed up in. Certainly a foreign one, perhaps on the other side of the New World. Did they speak Italian over there? He wasn't sure why – Italy was a defenceless little peninsula that was half ruled by Austria, half by his own country of Spain.

But he wasn't about to be dissuaded into servitude just yet. No, in this room, he was the one with the axe, and he was taller and stronger than his counterpart on the floor. It wouldn't take long for him to be back in command where he belonged, and then, then all his questions would be answered. Antonio grinned confidently, trying to ignore all the foreign, confusing objects, and ran a finger across the top of his axe. "Hola. I am Captain Antonio Fernandez Carriedo, of El Águila Carmesí. Yes, the Captain Carriedo, famed scourge of the Mediterranean. Thank you for releasing me. I don't know how long I'd been trapped in that cursed lamp."

His Italian, unused for quite some time, came out rather stilted and his accent was atrocious, but Antonio reckoned he'd been understood when the young man scrambled to his feet and the terrified look on his face morphed into something closer to anger. "What sort of joke is this, damn it?!" he spat, eyes darting in a hundred different directions. "You…the lamp…what the hell!" He seemed quite unable to comprehend his situation. Or Antonio's status, for another thing. Whoever this guy was, he certainly didn't know how to treat a pirate captain. Antonio might have to show him a thing or two.

"You don't know who I am do you?" Antonio realised. "I must really be far away from home."

The brown-haired Italian guy scoffed, seeming to be beginning to recover, despite his trembling. "Yeah, the mental asylum's about eighty miles that way," – here he jerked a thumb over his right shoulder – "and I suggest you get back there before you're missed."

"¿Qué?" Antonio frowned. This was only more confusing. Perhaps it was the dialect, perhaps the man was possessed, but he certainly wasn't making any sense. "Mental asylum? But I'm not mad. Why am I mad?"

"More to the point, why aren't you?" was the prompt retort. "You come in here with your stupid costumes and your fake axe and expect me to freak and believe you're an actual pirate after you put on some stupid show with what, a smoke machine and lights? I'm not stupid, damn it!"

Antonio pulled out his axe and swung it gently, contemplating the words. He didn't know what a machine or a costume was, but he knew banter when he heard it, and he knew well how to solve that little problem. "My axe isn't fake. See?" He took it in both hands, then swung the axe into the nearest wall with the force of a small rhinoceros, leaving a three-foot gash in the plaster that trickled dust and paint to the floor.

The other yelped and jumped back in shock. "Ahh! What the actual hell? Don't do that! My boss'll think that was me, and I'll have to pay for the repairs, you bastard! How sharp is that thing?! Where the fuck did you get something dangerous like that? That's completely mental!"

"Get it?" Once again, the strange language was confusing Antonio and it was rather beginning to tire him. "I didn't 'get' it. My grandfather gave it to me. It was my first proper weapon, and it's my beautiful pride and joy. I can split anything in half with this."

"No kidding," the Italian muttered, clutching onto the side of a wooden box and still trying to regain his breath after Antonio unexpectedly split a hole in the wall. "Whose grandfather gives a guy a goddamn axe, anyway? You'd get arrested for trying to buy something like that, let alone be able to carry it down the street!"

"The point of the axe is so you don't get arrested," Antonio pointed out, wondering what purpose his new acquaintance was trying to get across. "If any soldiers are around, they won't go near you. Their swords can't match this."

The young man shot Antonio a strange look. "Eh? Swords? Why on Earth would there be soldiers wandering about, and who carries swords anymore? I'm probably the only guy around here who's seen a sword in the past week, and that's only 'cos I work in a damn museum."

"What's a museum?" Antonio asked, feeling like he was interrogating someone with all these questions. "And what do you mean no one has swords? How else do they fight?"

Antonio was still being given that look that considered him a complete idiot, and he wasn't sure why. This Italian boy really didn't know who he was, and was continuing to abuse him as if he was some ordinary guy off the street. "Are you retarded or something? A museum, you know, a place where they stick all the useless junk from the past so idiot tourists can gawk at it? The place you're standing in now? Jeez. And no one uses swords 'cos they're useless. Unlike guns, you can't hit someone in the brain from a hundred metres using a sword. Well, unless you're really good at lobbing them." He frowned and peered at Antonio curiously. "What is with you?"

Antonio, meanwhile, was struggling to take this particular blow to his mind. "Ehh? No one uses swords? But they're useful! Axes too! Guns are messy, and bulky and take ages to reload, and you can't store more than one bullet in one at once! And what do you mean 'the past'? I'm not in the past, I'm in the now!" Against all his famed pirate ideology, Antonio was really beginning to panic, and he didn't like it. He didn't usually panic about things, he usually just axed them until they stopped being scary. But you couldn't axe information – it wasn't solid. Axes didn't affect it. And he couldn't axe the young Italian, as he was the only person he knew now. But there was just far too much new information for him to comprehend here; he'd gone from knowing everything about the place he'd been in for ages, to knowing nothing about somewhere that made no sense. Everything seemed to be backwards, and he had no idea what was going on.

"Whoa, calm down!" The Italian's agitated voice brought him back to Earth, and Antonio realised that he'd begun swinging his axe around in his confusion, nearly taking out one of the crates he was standing among. The unpredictable motion of the razor-sharp weapon was clearly making his companion uncomfortable – he looked like he was about to bolt, and he was biting his quivering lip. Feeling slightly guilty, Antonio lowered the axe and sank to the floor, not trusting his knees to hold him up in this strange new world.

"What's going on?" he asked no one in particular, as if somehow he'd get an answer he understood. "What kind of a place is this?"

XxxxX

Lovino was beyond shocked, confused, or even stunned. He wasn't built to cope with instability, and this latest turn of events had less stability than a broken bridge balanced on a half-finished Jenga tower. One minute he'd been cleaning out antiques, and the next, a guy in a ludicrous pirate costume had appeared from nowhere and started swinging the world's deadliest axe about like it was a children's toy. A massive, metal toy with a razor-sharp blade, it seemed.

Lovino had never seen anything quite like this guy. The long scarlet coat cascading from his shoulders was rather impressive, complete with gold trimming and sharp black cuffs, but there were patches around the edges if you looked closer, and the clumsy stitching was quite clearly hand-done. In fact, his whole outfit looked handmade, from the ruffled white shirt that showed off his toned chest muscles to the scuffed brown boots on his feet – they all looked like they hadn't been within fifteen miles of a sewing machine, let alone a factory production line. Untamed brown curls fell slightly in front of his tanned, handsome face, with the rest tied back in a loose ponytail with a scruffy red ribbon, and his piercing eyes shone like otherworldly emeralds. And, most worrisome of all, he had that giant dual-bladed axe that cut through walls, and if given the chance probably Italians as well, like a hot knife through butter. He looked like he'd stepped out of either the sixteenth century, or a seriously overcompensating movie. But everything was too well-worn to be a costume; the guy looked like he'd seen battle. Real battle.

But said pirate-guy had just collapsed to the floor, releasing his grip on his weapon as he did so, which in turn released the pressure on Lovino's heart. His head, which he'd previously been holding high and proud, was now turned towards the ground. He looked like he was about to cry. Until this point, Lovino had been sure that whatever was going on was an elaborate trick by someone who wanted to freak him out, but the sorrow and bewilderment of the eccentric guy – Antonio, he said his name was – just seemed far too genuine for it to be a prank. Why would someone pretending to be a pirate just collapse onto the floor in despair?

And Lovino's conscience, the annoying little part of his brain which always reared its head at inopportune moments and prodded him into doing embarrassing things, was now making him feel guilty for upsetting the guy and not being more supportive towards whatever fucked-up situation this was supposed to be. Damn it all. Why does this bastard part of my mind have to do this to me now of all times? He cursed to himself, but knew himself well enough to know that he didn't have much of a choice.

Deciding to go with the tactic he very rarely chose to use, he wandered over to where Antonio was kneeling and cleared his throat awkwardly. "Hey…c'mon. Uhh…don't cry? It'll be ok?"

It sounded stilted, maybe even emotionless, but what Lovino didn't know that it was exactly what Antonio needed to hear. As a man and more importantly as a captain, it was a direct challenge to his pride. The show of any sort of emotion or uncertainty was seen as a weakness to him, and as weakness was not to be tolerated for fear of mutiny, his baser instincts promptly pulled him out of it. "Cry? I'm not crying," Antonio replied, looking up from the floor and back up at Lovino, his expression making an unconvincing attempt to be determined. "I'm just a bit confused is all. Nothing's really making much sense to me."

Lovino shrugged and sat down next to him, feeling altogether too tall and responsible standing up. Things were weird enough already, so he may as well just go along with it and see where it took him. If nothing else, it'd be an amusing story for his friends when it ended in a few minutes. "You're not making any sense either, you know. For starters, the fuck was up with the lamp? I rubbed it, and suddenly you appear from nowhere, complete with green mist and fucking sparkles. How'd you do that, a smoke machine?"

Antonio's expression morphed back from determination to panic, and he looked at Lovino desperately. "What's a machine? I don't speak Italian very well."

"You don't say," Lovino sighed, not really in the mood to play games. "Fine. You want me to talk in Spanish instead? I can do Spanish well enough."

The pirate nodded in relief and eagerly switched to his native language. "Yes please. I don't understand what you're on about half the time. Can you explain please?" He seemed to have calmed down a little bit at this, but Lovino could still see the confusion in his eyes.

Still, even in Spanish it was a strange, even old-fashioned, way of talking, and Lovino had to process it through to understand what the pirate was talking about. He refrained from rolling his eyes – a rare gesture, just to stop the guy from panicking again – and instead just asked, "Ok, just to make this clear; this isn't a joke now, is it? 'Cos if this turns out to be all some massive prank, I swear I'm gonna kick your ass into next Tuesday, axe or no axe." His paranoid side wasn't letting go of the idea quickly, and he had to ask, just to check.

"No! It's not a joke, really!" Antonio said quickly, waving his hands in surrender. "I just don't know what's going on." Again, he seemed close to breaking down, and Lovino decided to cut him some slack.

"Ok, fine." Lovino sighed again. "What do you want me to explain first?"

Antonio paused for a moment, thinking to himself. "The thing with the swords. You said no one uses them anymore."

"Well, yeah," Lovino agreed. "No one's bothered with swords in hundreds of years. Common knowledge."

This was obviously the wrong thing to say, as the pirate yelped and his eyes widened in fear. "What! Hundreds of years? But…but…" Antonio was close to losing it now. If things hadn't made sense before, now they were really confusing. Hundreds of years? How long have I been trapped in that lamp for? This was worse than if he'd died – now he was in the future, or the present, such as it was – and the world had moved on far without him. He wouldn't know anything, or anyone; in fact, everyone he knew would have died long ago. His breath came in sharp, irregular gasps and the room started to spin.

"Hey, calm down!" Lovino feeling like he was far out of his depth, and more confused than ever, cautiously reached out a hand and touched the pirate on the shoulder. He'd never been good at coping with upset people, and if the person was a madcap guy in fancy dress, it was all the more complicated. He didn't fancy getting axed for trying to help. That obituary would suck.

The contact seemed to reassure Antonio, who gulped back a sob and stared at Lovino desperately. "Have I really been in there for hundreds of years?"

"How am I supposed to know, damn it?!" This was just getting weirder and weirder, and it hadn't exactly been normal from the start. This guy couldn't really be from the past, could he? Lovino could feel his head start to hurt, and he wished for a lifeline, something he knew which he could grasp onto that would make everything get back in line. But there wasn't one, not that he could see, and all he could do now was keep trying in the hope something would straighten out. "What was the year that you, uh, came from?"

Antonio frowned uncertainly. "Don't know. Never paid attention to it, really. Wasn't important. All I know is that it was July, and a few months before that, I'd been told be a merchant that it was about the beginning of the third year of the reign of Philip the Second. What year was that?"

"What?" Lovino had never even heard of Philip the Second, much less where or when he ruled. But, if it showed one thing, it reinforced the opinion that this guy actually was from the past, as there weren't exactly calendars around a few hundred years ago, not to the regular populace at least. Either that or the guy had done his research. Luckily, he remembered that he could look it up easily, and pulled his smartphone out of his pocket, clicking onto the web browser and opening Google's search bar.

"Aieee!" Antonio yelped shrilly from next to him, and diving behind his back. "What is that and what are you doing?" He clung to Lovino's shoulders like a limpet, staring fearfully at the small black device as it loaded the required page.

Lovino cursed to himself. Showing fancy technology to a guy who was from the past, or so it seemed, was a clearly stupid idea, and he should have realised that Antonio would freak out. Out of a lack of other ideas, and to get the guy to calm down, Lovino resorted to using small words, like he would to a child. "It's…a little box which I can use to find information. It's, like, how we do things in the future…uh, the now." The screen flashed at him as it finished loading and Lovino glanced back down. "It says that Philip the Second was king of Spain, right?"

Antonio nodded, but seemed no less calm. "Uh-huh. It was the start of the third year of his rule."

Lovino frowned slightly, trying to run calculations in his head. "That means it was about, uh, 1568 when you were and so…" He jumped, realising the implications of that. "Holy shit! You're telling me you've been in that lamp for nearly four hundred and fifty years?!"

"Four hundred and fifty years!" Antonio wailed, burrowing his head into the side of Lovino's neck, knocking his large black hat off in the process.

"Damn it, get off me!" Out of habit, Lovino squirmed out of his grip and swivelled around to face him. "If you remember, I'm just as confused as you here! I've told you where you are, now you tell me why you are here when you should be back in fifteen-sixty-fucking-eight!" By now, he was pretty mad. When he came to work this evening, no one told him he had to deal with an emotionally unstable pirate from several centuries past, and he was really beginning to lose his temper with how little sense this made. Antonio may not have done anything wrong here, but damn it, Lovino wanted someone to shout at.

Antonio sniffed and picked up his three-pointed hat off the floor, fiddling nervously with the edge with long calloused fingers. "Don't yell. Please." He blinked large emerald eyes at Lovino, who was somewhat thrown off guard by how vulnerable a pirate captain could look when thrown irreversibly out out of his comfort zone. It wasn't natural. He'd always imagined pirates to be unstoppable, merciless, muscle-bound tyrants.

He sighed and for the second time that evening, gave into his conscience. That bastard better not make me get in the habit of this. "Sorry," he muttered quietly. "Why were you in a lamp, then?"

"Do you want the full story, or the brief?" Antonio asked.

"As brief as it takes to make sense," Lovino replied immediately. "My brain's taken enough of a beating this evening, damn it all."

Antonio nodded. "Ok. Well, I was out looking for legendary treasure, and so was Kirkland– he's another pirate captain and my sworn enemy. I beat him to the treasure, so it was going to be mine, and he was really mad about it, so instead of challenging me to a fight about it like a normal guy, he used his magical powers to seal me in the lamp, which was with the treasure. I've been in there ever since, until you let me out just now."

This was a strange sequence of events to say the least, not to mention unbelievable. Lovino's mind was beginning to hurt as he struggled to get events in order. "So…this Kirkland guy is a magician as well as a pirate?" Lovino asked.

"Yup. I don't know why, but he just likes it. He used to use it quite a bit in our fights if it looked like I was winning."

"Hmph. Bastard seems like a sore loser to me," Lovino muttered, and he noted Antonio's eyes light up at this. "Anyway, another question. Are you expecting me to believe that magic exists?"

Antonio peered at him. "You mean you don't think it does?"

"Nah. Only people who think they can do magic are either lying or mentally ill, in my opinion. It's impossible. It's what people believed in before there was science."

"Science?" Antonio asked.

"Explanations of how the world works," Lovino sighed, annoyed with the constant questions. "Do I have to explain every single thing to you? It's annoying, damn it."

Antonio nodded hopefully. "Yes please. I don't get what's going on otherwise."

Lovino growled. "I don't see how that's my problem."

To Lovino's annoyance, the Spaniard pouted. "Please?"

A scowl crossed the Italian's face. Pirates were not allowed to be adorable, that had to be a crime against nature, and the way it poked Lovino's conscience was seriously irritating. He was annoyed at the guy for screwing with his shift – he should be home in the warm with tomatoes by now. He was annoyed at circumstance for shoving this guy in his face. He was annoyed at his boss for setting him with this stupidly long task. He was pretty much just overall annoyed. Lovino did annoyed really well. It was one of the things he was known for.

But…if he just left the Spanish bastard – Antonio – by himself…what then? The poor guy would be stuck four and a half centuries in the future, not understanding anything around him, from the geography, to the language, to the mannerisms, to the technology. He was depending on Lovino for help. Not just help – everything. And Lovino didn't have the heart to leave the pirate stranded like he was.

Not to mention that giant axe he had…if Lovino didn't take it off him soon, or at least teach him it was not ok to use it, some unfortunate bastard would probably end up minus a head, or at least a large percentage of a limb. And quite probably most of their stuff too. Pirates, if stories were to be believed, didn't believe in any kind of possessive pronoun but 'mine'.

Lovino sighed quietly, rolling his eyes as the anger slowly left him. "Fine. But on two conditions. One, you do not use that axe on me, or anyone else. Or anything else. And two, no stealing, pillaging, plundering, robbing, thieving, or any other synonym. Got it?"

All he received was a blank stare. "What's synonym?"

"A word that means the same," Lovino snapped. "Now, d'you agree or not? If not, you're on your own, time-travel or no time-travel."

"No! I mean, yes, I agree! Just don't leave me with all the…what did you call them? The flashy screen things that know everything, even things from hundreds of years past? I don't know things from hundreds of years in the past – what magic do those things use? But don't leave me by myself please!" The pirate's eyes were wide and pleading, and, despite the four-foot crack gouged into the wall, Lovino no longer saw him as a threat. He was trusting him to keep him safe, and the least Lovino could do was to give him a chance to adapt.

So Lovino bit back a sarcastic reply and pulled himself to his feet, all the while silently wondering what he'd got himself into. For some reason he was fairly sure that it wouldn't be the first time he'd thought that.

* * *

**Long chapter came out longer than expected. Ah well. Tis all good, considering I've not been writing much lately. Thank you, Temple Run 2. *rolls eyes* **

**And thank you everyone for the support on the first chapter! Seriously, I came back after labs and my email had about exploded. It's always great to know what people think of my work, and I hadn't expected this to be quite so popular~. So, big ups to all you guys :)**


	3. Chapter 3

Lovino, for once, was thankful for the late hour. Admittedly, it hadn't been that late when he'd found Antonio, but it had taken another hour for him to get through the rest of the sorting, even going at twice the pace he should have. It really hadn't helped that Antonio had constantly been asking inane questions about the most obvious of things. What're those glowy things on the ceiling? Why do you wear such weird clothes? Do you live here? What's an apartment? Lovino was about ready to punch a wall. Or the Spaniard. Whichever was unfortunate enough to be closer when he finally lost it. But by now, the two were walking back to Lovino's place, mostly due to the Italian's tiredness and a complete lack of ideas of where to board a sixteenth-century pirate, pun not intended. He wasn't sure what Feliciano, his brother, would make of the new turn of events, but he'd probably just smile and offer the pirate some pasta, like he was their harmless next-door neighbour.

Lovino reminded himself again to keep a watch on that. Antonio may unconditionally trust him as his guide to the twenty-first century, but Lovino did not hold the same esteemed view of him. To be frank, he didn't trust the pirate one bit. Piracy as a profession was known for fighting, looting, raping, and just being generally undesirable characters. Despite agreeing to let Antonio come with him, Lovino wasn't about to let down all his defences, and certainly not leave his beloved brother alone with a potentially dangerous man. He was still debating why he'd allowed Antonio to tag along home. There wasn't any benefit in it for him.

It certainly wasn't the company, either. They'd only been out walking for ten minutes, and Antonio had already talked his ears off. Everything was utterly fascinating to the guy, from passing cars to the height of buildings to the crumpled up can on the pavement. He wouldn't shut up about every little thing that happened to catch his attention, and would constantly want Lovino's verification on what it was, what it was used for, and how it worked. He was like a little kid, only larger, more dangerous, and Lovino couldn't return him to his parents for babysitting money. Unfortunately.

Antonio was rubbernecking like a nerd at his first comic convention, complete with giant wide eyes and a brainful of opinions that meant nothing. Lovino wasn't the most patient of men, and this guy was really pushing at his limits. He wasn't even sure what had possessed him to adopt a time-disorientated pirate – and he still wasn't 100% sure on the time-disorientated part either. If it hadn't have been for the appearing-from-nowhere-with-green-smoke thing, Lovino would have been certain the guy was either mad or on drugs. Or both.

What really annoyed Lovino was that he'd been forced to leave his beloved motorbike back at the museum. It was how he got everywhere – motorbikes were really useful in the tight Italian streets, especially for playing vehicle and pedestrian slalom – and it cut his journey time over threefold. But Lovino didn't even need to show his pirate companion the bike to know that the Spaniard would completely freak at the sight. Vehicles of any kind save for carts would have been alien in the sixteenth century, and this sleek two-wheeled creature would have just perplexed Antonio. And this would have even been before he got on it. Lovino really did not fancy dying in a motorbike crash with a screaming pirate gripping his waist as his last sensations of the world. No, Antonio would have to be gently weaned onto any kind of modern technology. Lovino was going to have to do his best to keep him shut in the flat for the time being. If they ever got there.

At least it was half-ten at night, and there was almost no one around to watch an irritated nineteen-year-old drag a strangely-dressed man away from hugging the nearest streetlamps and hiding from ominously closed shopfronts.

It was five to eleven by the time the pair finally reached the apartment block where Lovino resided; an off-gold-painted four-storey building with cream moulding around the top. He was rather glad it wasn't one of those giant American skyscrapers of glass and steel – now that really would have freaked Antonio out. It certainly wasn't 1560s style, but it was old-style enough for Antonio to be relatively comfortable looking at.

For about five seconds.

"Lovi? What's that?" Antonio was pointing excitedly at a street sign, of all the mundane things.

'Lovi' growled. How he hated that nickname, and he'd had it for less than an hour. Not that the pirate would shut up if he protested. "My name. Is not. Lovi. And that's another street sign, like the last two you asked me about. They're not uncommon. This one means 'No Through Road'. Which means you can't drive down it, before you ask."

"Why not?" Antonio immediately responded back, staring up at the painted metal.

Lovino resisted the urge to slam his palm into his forehead. "Because the road doesn't go anywhere. It's a dead end. Now can we go inside already? I'm getting a migraine from all your inane questions."

"What's a migraine?" was his immediate and inopportune reply.

"A bad headache, damn it!" Lovino growled. He'd been joking about the migraine a few seconds ago…now he could really feel one beginning to turn up. Antonio seemed to be completely unable to tell when he was really pissing Lovino off. "Go inside."

Thankfully, Antonio turned away from the most interesting sign in the world and up to the entrance to the building. Unfortunately, he was far from silent. "You must be really rich, Lovi. You've even got glass in your doors."

"Glass is cheap now, dumbass," Lovino retorted, sliding his key into the lock and opening the door to the lobby. "It's only made from sand and there's loads of that on beaches and crap. Now get inside before I kick your ass in." He had to make sure the pirate knew that – the landlord would throw a fit if someone stole the doors. Especially if said stolen doors ended up in Lovino's own apartment.

Antonio, as he had been doing, reluctantly complied, and part of Lovino wondered why, if the man was such a famous pirate captain, he hadn't stuck a weapon through Lovino's head for being so insolent. He'd certainly been trigger-happy with the axe earlier – if it were possible to be trigger happy with a melée weapon – as he'd stuck it through the wall without a second thought. Why not Lovino? Or, at the very least, been threatened with it in favour of some kinder and more polite words. But no. The pirate had just been happy enough to follow. Perhaps he was waiting until he was familiar and comfortable with the territory before he could rid himself of the guide he currently – and probably reluctantly – depended on. Lovino didn't know, and he didn't like to think about it. It had been his ill luck to land up with Antonio in the first place – he didn't want to lose his limbs for it too.

Said pirate captain was gawping at the inside of the lobby. To Lovino, it really wasn't much – the building wasn't a particularly lavish or expensive one – just a room with black-tiled flooring, a wall of metal lockers for letters and parcels on one side, closed steel doors to a lift next to the flight of stairs. But, it seemed to be mind-blowing to the sixteenth-century eye, as Antonio was currently demonstrating.

"Whoa! You live in this place? It's…it's…wow!" Antonio was running over to each of the room's sides in turn, unable to keep still, eyes wider than ping-pong balls. "What're these boxes?"

Lovino rolled his eyes and motioned towards the stairs. "They're postboxes. We get letters in them."

Antonio blinked. "You have a messenger all to yourself? Or does he deliver all the letters? I didn't think you looked important enough to get messages."

Lovino wasn't sure whether to be insulted or not. "Everyone gets letters, idiot. And it's not a messenger, it's a postman. Gah…doesn't matter. Just follow me already. And keep your goddamn voice down and try not to disturb anyone else."

Antonio followed, but it was far from quietly. "Anyone else? I thought you only lived with your hermano?"

"Yes, but this…lots of people live here, ok? Apartment buildings…they're like lots of houses on top of each other in one building. Only one of them is mine. So there's lots of other people here too, and – don't do that!" He scrambled forwards to prevent Antonio from investigating behind a door. "That's not my flat! You can't just go wandering into places that aren't yours! Or you've not been invited into!"

Antonio blinked at him, one hand still around the doorknob. "Why not? Other people have nice stuff. If they can't protect it, I can take it, right?"

"No!" Lovino yelled at him. "If it's not yours, it's not yours, and you can't take it, capisce?!Just…just stop doing anything! Tch!" He spun around and flounced up the next flight of stairs. They'd only reached the first floor and already there'd almost been trouble.

It was just as he turned about that he noticed Antonio was still on the first-floor landing, staring after him with bright green eyes. He was cheerfully whistling something jaunty that couldn't help but grind on Lovino's nerves, and clearly wasn't going anywhere.

Lovino growled at him. "What the fuck do you think you're doing? I'm not giving you leave to go pillage my neighbours so you can just get your ass up here right now."

Antonio smiled innocently at him – or at least as innocent as a pirate could get. "But Lovi. You told me to stop doing anything. And following you upstairs was a thing."

This was about the last straw for poor Lovino's strained nerves. Whether the pirate was trying to be funny, annoying, or just plain ignorant, Lovino had had enough. This guy may have been the boss on his ship four centuries ago, but here, he relied on Lovino, who was not about to take any more crap from some guy who barely even knew him. And so, he did what he did best; be mad. "I DIDN'T MEAN STOP FOLLOWING ME, ASSHOLE! I MEANT STOP DOING WHATEVER STUPID FUCKING THING YOU'D NORMALLY DO, AND JUST DO WHAT I SAY. GOT IT? OTHERWISE I SWEAR TO GOD I'M FUCKING LEAVING YOU TO FEND FOR YOURSELF! NOW SHUT THE FUCK UP AND FOLLOW ME UPSTAIRS!" Lovino was shaking like a leaf by the time he'd finished shouting, but trying not to let it show; he may have been mad, but he was positive the pirate was going to take this as a threat to his authority and do what pirates did best – namely, fight – and Lovino was ready to beat a hasty retreat upstairs if Antonio looked to be so much as thinking about his axe.

Apparently the threat of abandonment was enough, though, and Antonio meekly started up the stairs. Lovino wasn't sure how long this behaviour would last, though. Sooner or later, Antonio was going to stop taking orders from a skinny nineteen-year-old.

"Loud enough for you, Mr. Vargas?" asked a tired, yet faintly amused, voice from below. Old Rodolfo Agnelli was a grumpy yet pious old man from apartment 1C; bearded and wrinkled, and wearing a crumpled white nightshirt and grey flannel dressing-gown which showed off a pair of bony knees. He liked to complain regularly about anything and everything, save for his beloved church. Needless to say, Lovino was a regular target of his complaints, despite the two-storey difference in their domiciles.

Lovino tried his best to look shameful instead of angry, despite wanting to grump right back at the old man. "Sorry, Signor. I'll try be quieter in future." He wouldn't put it past old Agnelli to complain to the landlord, and he really didn't want questioning about now. Not when he was taking in an uncontracted guest for an undetermined period of time, who technically didn't even exist, much less show up on city records.

"Yes, well, this is definitely not what I'd call a reasonable hour to be shouting like a hooligan. See that you and your oddly-dressed friend keep in line in future." Agnelli's gaze lingered briefly on Antonio for a few moments, before he retreated back into his own apartment and left Lovino and Antonio to themselves.

Lovino sighed. "Fuck, I hate that guy sometimes. C'mon, let's go."

It was only a few steps of blissful silence before Antonio spoke again. "Why did you let him talk to you like that? He's old and you're pretty feisty – couldn't you have told him to leave you alone at the very least? I wouldn't stand anyone chastising me like that." He didn't explain further from here – he seemed slightly subdued after Lovino's outburst – but Lovino could easily imagine what a pirate's consequences might be.

Lovino sighed again and rubbed the bridge of his nose, suddenly exhausted and not in the mood to talk. "Things are different nowadays, ok? We don't treat people like that. Now, will you just shut up and walk? I'll explain more tomorrow; I'm tired."

Antonio raised an eyebrow at him, not convinced in the slightest, but for once he didn't reply, and the pair ascended the final couple of staircases in Lovino's first blissful silence of the night.

Of course, his head was still pounding with questions and thoughts and worries, but it was a physical silence, and there wasn't a pirate talking his ear off, and for that, Lovino was grateful. Yet he could tell his relief would be short-lived, unless Feliciano was asleep upstairs. He dreaded to think what those two would say when they met. Both were highly annoying and could talk the hind legs off a donkey. If he was lucky, his brother would be in bed, and he could put off the impossible task of acculturate a man from four and a half centuries ago into the modern-day world until tomorrow came.

"Is it your apartment yet?" Antonio broke the silence. "You said it was three. I can count well enough, and it's been three. Are we there yet?"

He's like a child, in a strange way, Lovino thought, but decided not to voice that idea. "Yes. It's right here." He pointed at the door with the brass 3B lettering that was about four feet in front of them. "Don't bother trying to get in yet; it's locked." He dug in his pocket for the set of keys which dwelt there, and quickly stuck a thick silver one into the lock.

"Wow," Antonio observed. "That's a pretty small key."

"Everything's shrunk nowadays," Lovino grumbled as he pushed the door inwards. "Try to be quiet. My brother's asleep and it'll be so much easier if we don't wake him up."

Antonio nodded and followed Lovino's skulk into the apartment. It seemed that he did know how to be quiet after all. Then again, some things may require a bit of stealth to steal, and it was definitely easier to escape one's law-abiding captors if one was quiet, so Lovino wasn't entirely surprised. The room was almost pitch black, save for the weak light coming in from the street, and Lovino paused to let his eyes adjust. It seemed that Feliciano really had gone to bed, and Lovino was very wary about waking him up. It would be easier to explain the pirate tomorrow morning – not that it would be an easy task in the first place.

"What now?" Antonio whispered behind him. The pirate had snuck in and closed the door behind him with barely a sound, but he seemed confused by Lovino's current lack of movement.

What now? What indeed? Lovino wondered to himself. Now that he'd actually got the pirate here, he was a bit stuck as to what to do next. He hadn't planned this far. Then again, he'd been making everything up on the fly, so he may as well continue down the path he'd started. He thought for a few moments, then replied. "Go over there, turn left. You know which way left is, I hope. It's a bedroom. With a bed. Sleep in it. Don't leave the room until I come get you tomorrow morning. Believe me, it'll be a lot easier that way. Oh, and if you steal anything, I will murder your face off."

Antonio frowned. Lovino hadn't expected the threat to go down well, but he had to lay down some boundaries. "Ok. But what happens if I…uh…you know…erm…how do you phrase it in modern times? Visit the privy?"

Lovino rolled his eyes. "Take a piss? That room there." He pointed at a white-fronted door at the start of the T-junction to the bedrooms. "Piss in the one that looks like it can be used as a seat, wash your hands in the sink by turning the taps. If you get them the wrong way round, you're cleaning it up. And don't touch anything else at all, it's all scary modern stuff. Got it?"

Antonio was still frowning. He did not seem keen on the way that Lovino was telling him what to do. But Lovino was too tired to care. "Right. Uh…goodnight then."

"Yeah, whatever." Lovino waved the pirate off, hoping he would just be able to crash on the sofa and sleep and hope he could wake up and this would all be a dream caused by cleaning chemicals. Waking up on the floor of the museum on a Saturday morning by an inevitably pissed-off boss would be bad, but at least it wouldn't be on the level of this.

Once he heard the bedroom door close, Lovino could finally take a break, collapsing on the sofa's welcoming cushions with a tired sigh. This had been the most trying evening he'd known in months, and his nerves were frazzled. Hopefully he'd learn how to cope with a pirate soon, or he'd end up in a mental hospital.

His reasons for surrendering his bedroom to Antonio were threefold. One; there was only one way out of the apartment, and by sleeping on the sofa, he was blocking it and therefore preventing Antonio from making off with the valuables. If he was a fraud, this would be the chance he'd been waiting for. If he was real, he'd make off with anything shiny as opposed to knowing what was actually valuable. Lovino wasn't sure what he could do in front of that axe, but he'd feel better for doing so. The second reason was that he suspected Antonio would be more compliant at being given the best quarters to sleep in. It would appeal to his sense of pride as a captain, and get him to shut up faster. Thirdly, it would keep him confined someplace until he could explain things to Feliciano. He didn't want to leave his naïve and trusting little brother alone with a pirate.

He retrieved a thin blanket from out of the cupboard and rearranged the sofa cushions to make a suitable pillow. His white shirt, dusty from its evening's work, landed shortly afterwards on the floor as its owner curled up under the blanket and sighed, trying to ignore the headache nagging at his cranium.

Sleep didn't come easily to Lovino that night.

XxxxX

Antonio had never felt so lost or confused in his life. And he'd been becalmed in the middle of the Atlantic without a map once.

His mind was just a giant mix of emotions. Some good – excitement, wonder, amazement – but others were…somewhat less so.

To be honest with himself, he was starting to miss the lamp. Yes, it had been completely confining, dark, and lonely, but at least it was consistent and it made sense. Everything here was just…wrong. Nothing made any sense, he didn't understand what anything did, and if you took Lovino's voice tone literally, Antonio seemed likely to land himself in serious trouble pretty soon. Isolating wasn't even close to the word he was looking for. It just seemed completely impossible. Once he had a place in this world. Now he had none.

If Antonio knew how to do two things, it was to fight and to steal. And he couldn't do either of those here. You couldn't kick the ass of a concept or something confusing, and he couldn't turn on Lovino. He was the one person Antonio knew in this confusing new world and he was helping him, albeit with a foul mouth and complaints. If Antonio started fighting him for authority, threatening him not to swear and to be more obedient, or taking all of his stuff, Lovino would just let him go and Antonio would be left to struggle by himself in a world where swords were useless, people rode around in strange metal carts that drove themselves, and little boxes could tell you who was king five hundred years ago. No, he needed Lovino, for the moment at least. Antonio wasn't the brightest guy, but he knew this much.

But perhaps, once Antonio knew more of the area and its customs, things would change. Perhaps, once again, he would be the boss; the one with the talking boxes, the one with the five-storey house, the one who was doing all the shouting. Yes, the pirate decided. I will bide my time, for now. I'll learn of this place, and then everyone will learn of theirs. I will gain back my notoriety, my loyal crew, my vast wealth. I only need to be patient.

Until then, he reckoned he could do worse than to go with the flow. There had to be some useful and interesting points to this place. Somewhere, there had been development in the world, and it looked positively mind-blowing, if all the things he'd seen that night were anything to go by. He'd wanted to see the world, to travel the world, and now the world he'd travelled had transformed into something new and amazing.. Like he had to start over from the beginning, but it was like doing something exciting for the first time.

What was irritating him currently, though, was that Lovino was making him stay in this strange room by himself. Antonio wasn't sure if it was for safety, or the future's version of being confined to quarters. Either way, he didn't like it. And ever since he'd poked a small silver box which had promptly lit up bright and made a loud beeping noise at him, he'd been reluctant to touch anything for fear of booby traps. He'd barely slept, either. Partly this was just because he'd gotten a lot of sleep in the lamp, and wasn't tired, but it was also partly because of the bed. It was just so soft. His bed back on the ship had been a thick feather mattress covered in linen sheets, but he'd gotten used to the (what felt like) months in the lamp, and that had been pure metal and hard as rock. Here, Lovino's bed – he assumed it was Lovino's; it smelled like him – was warm and comfortable, and the mattress was springy. It was the oddest sensation to have the bed bounce back at you when you lay on it.

Antonio was currently sprawled on aforementioned bed. His axe was leant against one of the white-painted walls, and his rich red coat was draped over the back of what he assumed was a chair. It looked like a chair, but it had wheels, of all the strangest things. Why would a chair need wheels? They weren't for going anywhere. And the desk behind the chair was covered in papers decorated with lines of the strangest symbols; Antonio had paid little attention to those. He'd briefly looked over everything in the room, out of habit, to see if there was anything worth taking, but it had all been so strange and confusing that he couldn't even tell what was valuable and what was junk. Half of what was there was made of brightly coloured materials that Antonio hadn't come across before, and couldn't fathom what it was made of. Lovino was right – modern things were scary. And Antonio didn't get scared often.

But, then again, it was the lack of information that was scary. He knew nothing about this place. He'd gone from dominant to vulnerable.

The pirate wanted answers to the long list of questions his virtually sleepless night had spawned, but there was no one around to give them. He wondered what was taking Lovino so long. Judging from the light streaming in the window, it had been past dawn for several hours now. Surely Lovino would have been up by now. Today was the first day in, if Lovino was telling the truth, over four hundred years that Antonio was free and unconfined, and he was rather annoyed about having to spend the first few hours of it bored and limited.

This thought was suddenly interrupted by a nagging feeling in his nether regions. Antonio frowned curiously to himself. It had been very strange to have his bodily functions return to him. In the lamp, he'd experience neither hunger, nor thirst, nor ageing, and yet halfway through the night his stomach had suddenly decided that it wanted feeding. Thankfully, Antonio had been delighted to find a few tomatoes on the desk nearby, and those had sated his cravings for the time being. He hadn't wanted to go searching for whatever might pass as food in this time, and surely Lovino wouldn't mind him taking them. But now, it seemed that his body had a different idea. He was glad he'd asked Lovino earlier.

And it did give him an excuse to leave the room and go wandering. He jumped to his feet and laced his boots back on from where he'd taken them off. The pirate had slept in his clothes, save for the coat and boots, as he had no nightshirt and didn't want to get surprised naked in a strange place. So it was in his rumpled, off-white shirt, roughspun brown trousers and well-worn leather boots that he cautiously left the room.

As he suspected, everything was silent, but even so he gave everywhere a watchful glance before he exited the bedroom and headed for the white door he'd seen the night before. The building was still a mystery to him, and he wasn't sure he could trust anyone yet. What motivation would Lovino have for adopting a time-stranded pirate? It certainly didn't seem in character for what little he'd seen of the grumpy Italian.

He pondered on this only briefly; the white cleanliness of what passed for a garderobe nowadays was truly stunning. But he kept mindful to what Lovino had told him. Not that he was ever going to clean anything up, let alone this, but it wouldn't do to anger his guide at the moment. He'd got somewhat surprised by the taps though. He'd turned one out of curiosity, and it had sprayed him with a shower of water droplets. The majority of its jet had just gone down a drain, though, and Antonio wondered where all the water went to. There didn't appear to be a storage tank, and it couldn't have just gone down as someone lived below them, and Antonio doubted anyone would want to live in such conditions.

It was with great reluctance that he refrained from further investigating and exited the white room. There still didn't appear to be any more noise or signs of life, and Antonio wondered why Lovino was making him wait so long. What was it he had to do that was so important? Antonio guessed he had to go back to the bedroom, though. As much as he hated the idea, he had to bide his time and be relatively obedient until Lovino could tell him more about this strange time.

But it was just as he touched the door handle to the bedroom that a voice sounded cheerfully behind him. "Hello?"

Antonio whirled around, wishing he'd had the foresight to bring his axe with him. He shouldn't have trusted that there was no danger here.

But the speaker was a slight boy with reddish-brown hair and a quizzical expression, wearing a pink tank top and yellow shorts – the oddest of garb for a teenaged boy. He didn't look like much harm. He rubbed one eye and blinked curiously at Antonio. Again, like Lovino, he didn't seem scared of the pirate, and that was a reaction that Antonio wasn't pleased with. Fear instilled a helpful dose of obedience. But no, the boy only looked surprised. "Ve~. Who are you? I didn't think fratello tended to bring people over."

Antonio was only just able to comprehend the words; they were still in that odd dialect of Italian that he barely understood, and he found himself longing for Lovino's blunt, accented Spanish. "Huh?" He blinked, hoping he'd get some clarification. He'd no idea what a fratello was. It sounded sort of familiar, but he couldn't recall its meaning.

The boy smiled brightly at him. "You're a friend of Lovino's right? I'm his brother, Feliciano. It's nice to meet you. Did you stay overnight?"

Antonio understood this a bit better, and it cleared up a few of his many questions. "Yes, I did. Do you know if Lovino's awake yet?"

This seemed to confuse Feliciano. "Huh? Didn't you guys sleep in the same room? I'd have thought…" He tailed off uncertainly, as if trying to make sense of Antonio's reply.

"No. He surrendered his quarters to me," Antonio told him. "Lovino slept elsewhere. He said he'd be back in the morning, but it's been morning for hours and I've not seen him."

Light dawned on the younger boy's face. "Ohh. So you guys didn't… Ah, I'm sorry~. But yeah, it's still pretty early. I don't think fratello will be up yet. He likes to sleep in on Saturdays, and it's only about eight, so he won't be up for ages. Do you want me to get him? He really should get up if he's got a guest over. It's rude to ignore you~. Why did you stay over, anyway? Are you from fratello's school, or work?"

He sure talks a lot, even if he is cute, Antonio thought. He wasn't really sure how to reply to this. He wasn't even sure if he'd been able to translate it right. 'School' certainly didn't sound like Lovino. But he understood one bit. "Uh, could you go get him for me? I don't know where he is at the moment."

Feliciano smiled. "Sure~! He's probably sleeping on the sofa if you've got his room. I wonder why he did that. He's usually not so nice." But, before Antonio could reply to this, Feliciano turned and wandered into the living room. "Fratello! Wake up!"

Antonio poked his head around the corner and watched the younger sibling shake his brother awake.

Lovino, curled up on the sofa with a blanket half-draped across him, opened one eye and glared at his brother. "What do you want? Go away." The blanket slid off his shoulders as he moved, revealing part of a slim, toned torso. Antonio had to drag his eyes away from the sight – such thoughts weren't wisest at this time.

"Ve~!" Evidently Feliciano was used to Lovino acting like this, and seemed completely oblivious to his sibling's grump. "But fratello! You've got to get up. Your friend was wondering where you were. You should have told me we had a guest over~. I like guests. What's his name? How did you meet?"

Lovino interrupted him. "The fuck? How'd you…?" His eyes focused on Antonio loitering at the edge of the room. "Ah! I told you to stay in my bedroom till I came to get you!"

"I was bored though," Antonio pointed out. "It's been morning for hours and you hadn't come yet."

"It's barely morning," Lovino groaned in response. "It's, what? Five to eight? And I was up till midnight or something helping your sorry ass. Can't I even get a good night's sleep? Or do you pirate bastards work from dawn?"

"Pirate?" Feliciano butted in before Antonio could reply. "What pirate?"

Lovino groaned again. "Fuck… This is why I didn't want you two to meet until I'd had a chance to explain." He promptly faceplanted into the cushion he'd been using for a pillow and mumbled something uncomplimentary.

Feliciano turned to Antonio instead. "What does he mean? Do you know?"

Antonio nodded. "Mmm. But…do you speak Spanish? I don't know the words for it and it's hard to understand you guys as it is."

"No, sorry." Feliciano's face fell, and Antonio just wanted to hug him, but he held himself in check. "We had a choice of languages at school, and I picked German instead of Spanish, which is what fratello did. Does he talk to you in Spanish?"

"He did yesterday."

"You've only known him a day?" Feliciano looked surprised. "Wow. It usually takes a long time for fratello to make friends."

"Shut the fuck up, Feliciano," Lovino snapped, pulling his head back out of the cushion and glaring at them. "And he's not my friend." He swung his legs off the sofa and sat up properly, pulling the covers over his chest to conserve warmth. Antonio tried not to think disappointed. "Look, will you morons shut up for five minutes and let me explain. This would be so much easier if you'd have just stayed where you were and let me tell Feli in my own time, damn it all!"

Antonio wasn't sure if he was meant to be sorry or not. It certainly wasn't his fault that he'd come across Lovino's brother, and he wasn't going to be sorry for no reason.

Lovino sighed when he got no response from either. "Right. So, introductions first. Bastard, this is my younger brother Feliciano. As he said, he doesn't know Spanish, so we're sticking to Italian. Deal with it. Feli, this is Antonio Fer-something-or-other, I don't care."

"Fernandez Carriedo," Antonio corrected, not that anyone was listening for his name.

Feliciano crossed to the sofa and jumped onto the cushions next to his brother. "Who's he? From school, or work? How did you meet?"

"Shut up, goddamn it. It's complicated as fuck, and I'm still confused by a lot of it, so shut up and listen, ok?" Bleary-eyed, tousle-haired and grumpy, Lovino looked quite adorable from where Antonio was standing – but the Spaniard knew he shouldn't think that way. He'd stopped himself from this years ago.

Feliciano nodded. "Ok."

"Right. So, I was at work yesterday. My boss had just got a big shipment of stuff in from a salvage expedition, and I was expected to clean it all. Three boxes in, I find a battered old lamp. Looked kinda like that one from Aladdin, only more corroded and battered and shit. So, I go to clean it, like I'm being paid to do, and the damn thing suddenly spouts green smoke and sparks, and he-" he pointed to Antonio, "-appears out of nowhere."

Feliciano was wide-eyed at this revelation. "Really? Wow! That's amazing! How did you get in the lamp, Mr. Antonio?"

"I'm getting to that," Lovino grumbled before the addressed could reply. Antonio was happy to let him talk, for the moment. The Italian native was much better at the language than he was – it was only due to Lovino's understanding of Spanish that the two had been communicating so well. "You're gonna struggle believing this, Feli, but it's true to the best of my knowledge so bear with it. This moron-" he jerked a thumb at Antonio again "-is a pirate from the sixteenth century. What year did you say it was, 1568? Something like that. Yeah, so anyway, one day he was screwing around or some shit, and pissed off his archenemesis, who can do magic. So this jerk shuts him in a lamp where you don't seem to age, or die, which is a bit fucking stupid really. And he got released when I rubbed the damn thing when I was at work yesterday evening. And there you have it. One sixteen-century pirate in our living room. Can I go back to sleep yet?"

Feliciano was looking at Antonio with wide, curious eyes. "You're really a pirate? Awesome! Do you do pirate stuff?"

Antonio heard Lovino's hand hit his forehead. "God, I hope your DNA's not genetic. I'm the brother of a moron."

The pirate himself just laughed and nodded brightly. "Sure! I'm a pirate, so everything I do is pirate stuff. Not that I've been doing much lately, being trapped in a lamp."

"It must have gotten so boring being in a tiny lamp for that long," Feliciano agreed. "Did you have something to do while you waited for fratello to rescue you?"

Antonio shook his head and gave a relieved smile. "No. I didn't really expect that to happen. I spent most of my time asleep. It only felt like a few months though, not however many years Lovi said it was."

"Name's not Lovi," Lovino grumbled, but Antonio just laughed cheerily and continued.

"I guess it was the magic that made time pass less fast in there. I didn't need to eat or anything either, which was lucky because there was no food. I missed food though. And it's weird. Now I'm out, I've been starting to feel hungry again." God, it felt good to talk to people again. It had been awfully lonely in that lamp, and Antonio was loving the change of pace and chance for some company. And it seemed that he had four-and-a-half centuries worth of talking to make up for. It felt so great.

Feliciano's eyes went wide. "Ve~? You mean magic exists? Really? Wow, that's so cool! Can you do magic right now?"

Antonio shook his head. "Only witches and warlocks can do magic. Captain Kirkland – he's the guy who shut me in that lamp – he's a warlock. But I can't."

"Aw," Feliciano's face fell. "Do you think I could do magic? I could make pasta at any time without effort, and I wouldn't need to do my homework-"

"Moron, you can't become a warlock just 'cos you want to be lazy," Lovino growled. "Are you two just going to prattle on like this all day?"

Antonio was somewhat annoyed at his limited range of modern-day language again. He really needed to get some practise. "What's prattle?"

"Pointless, idiotic chatter. Like you." Lovino rolled his eyes. "You bastards woke me up for this?"

Antonio raised an eyebrow, and momentarily wished he was back on his ship. Laziness and insolence wouldn't be tolerated there. Lovino would have been up at the crack of dawn to answer some questions, and perhaps for breakfast. At least they had tomatoes in the future, but Antonio knew nothing about the local cuisine. Sure, he was a pirate and used to eating sub-par food, but it would be nice to know what to expect for the next while. Especially as, apart from those few tomatoes earlier, he hadn't eaten in almost four hundred and fifty years, and there were so many things he missed. But it wasn't a good idea to get sidetracked thinking about food now, and Antonio realised just in time to pull himself back into reality and answer. "But it's been morning for ages, and you promised to tell me more this morning."

"I promised no such fucking thing," Lovino grumbled back, but he couldn't continue any further, as it seemed Antonio had an unexpected ally.

"C'mon, fratello!" Feliciano poked happily at his brother's arm. "How often is it that you get to show someone around the wonders of our world? We could show Antonio all the neat stuff that we've got here, and then take him on a tour of the city and show him how far we've gotten since his time~. I mean, we've got electricity, and cars, and computers, and all sorts of cool stuff! He'll love it!"

"He'll try steal it, the bastard," Lovino muttered. "And yes, I know he's right there. He wants me to show him around, he can wait until I've got up, damn it."

Feliciano pouted, further pawing at his brother despite the older's attempts to hide under the chequered blanket. "But fratello! That's not fair! He's been waiting years to see outside. Poor Toni." He had a nickname already? It had been years since anyone had called him anything but Captain. "We have to go out! And if you're too busy to sleep, I can take him on a tour. It'll be fun~!"

Antonio noticed the annoyed, yet almost horrified, look which decorated Lovino's face at these words, and instantly knew that they'd won. Excitement bubbled up in his chest, causing another grin to sprout on his face, and for a short moment, he felt like a young child again, being let out to explore the magic of an unknown world for the first time.

Lovino groaned. "Goddamn it, fine. Give me half an hour to have a shower and get dressed, then we'll go on a tour." He clicked his tongue in irritation. "The hell am I even thinking? I'm bringing a pirate captain into Rome on a Saturday morning. Fuck, this isn't going to end well." He threw the blanket back onto the sofa and stomped off before Antonio or Feliciano could reply.

* * *

**As a point of interest, Rodolfo Agnelli is Vatican City (non-official, of course). I just felt like including him. **

**First and foremost, however, I apologise for the late-ness of this chapter. Life has been dealing me some serious shit lately, and I've been struggling to cope, let alone write cheerful fics. HOWEVER. By no means is anything getting abandoned. It just may update a little behind schedule. Not that I have a schedule. **

**Many thanks to all my reviews, follows and favs. Seriously, all of them make my day. And not much makes my day lately. Thanking yous very muchly~ :3**

**Stay tuned for some shenanigans in Rome! **


	4. Chapter 4

Fucking younger brothers.

Lovino had wanted to sleep in, to get a few extra hours of denial of having to babysit a pirate, but no, Feliciano couldn't let him have that. His brother knew full well that Lovino would never let him out with someone who was barely more than a stranger, and he'd used that to his complete advantage. Maybe. Probably.…Perhaps. Lovino had known him most of his life, and still could never entirely tell whether Feliciano was secretly a genius, or dumb as a brick all the way through. He'd have these moments of pure revelation, that made Lovino look at things in a different light, but most of the time Feliciano didn't seem to be able to tell one end of a book from the other.

"There's so many people!" came a cry from a few feet to the older Italian's left.

This, of course, was Antonio. Bastard seemed to be alternating between far too excitable and horribly out of place far too much for Lovino's liking. The guy had just done the equivalent of unanticipated time-travel into a world he didn't know– how the hell could he be excited about his present situation? Lovino knew if he'd ended up in the future he'd be pretty pissed off, but it seemed that Antonio didn't really do angry. How someone like that could end up as a so-called 'feared pirate captain', if that's what he really was, Lovino really didn't know. Surely piracy, at some point, required getting pissed off at someone and sticking that giant axe through their brains. He made a mental note to himself not to test that theory, though. He was rather fond of his brains where they were currently; safely in his head.

"It's Saturday morning," Lovino grumbled at him. "Everyone's out. And before you ask, it's 'cos they've been working all week and want a day off now. Therefore, they go out on a Saturday to relax and do things they want to do instead."

Antonio looked at him quizzically, and Lovino knew he'd said one sentence too many to avoid a questioning reply. "Why don't they do what they want all week?"

"'Cos work," Lovino replied irritably. How was he meant to explain the working economy of the twenty-first century to someone who'd probably never done an honest day's work in his life?

"Why don't they get jobs doing what they want then?"

"'Cos people don't pay you for that! Goddamn it, shut the hell up already!"

"Why?"

Lovino felt like he was getting the beginnings of a migraine again, and he didn't even suffer from them. He hoped it wasn't going to become a regular occurrence. "Because you're annoying me."

"Ve~! Be nice, fratello! He's only curious."

As Lovino has said earlier; fucking younger brothers. Feliciano had taken to the pirate like a turtle takes to water – despite numerous warnings – and Lovino was pissed off that his brother was sticking up for the pirate instead of his not-so-long-suffering sibling. Traitorous little bastard. Thankfully, this had its good side as well as the bad – Feliciano also liked talking, and was more than happy to answer Antonio's inane questions about the place. 'The place' was everywhere from rooms in their flat, to streets they'd walked through, up to the park which was their destination. Antonio had begged (well, perhaps not begged, just been rather annoying) to be let out, and Lovino had decided the park was probably the safest place to be. It was fairly close by, with lots of wide green spaces and less technology than most downside was the amount of people, especially on a day like this, but Lovino was reasoning that so long as the pirate was unarmed and they weren't out for long, things would be ok. He hoped things would be ok. But the combined annoyance-team of Feliciano and Antonio had been more than Lovino could cope with on a Saturday morning when he should be asleep, much less fight against, and so, here they were. Out in the open instead of safe, inside, and figuring out what the fuck was currently going on.

The other thing Lovino was pissed about was the pirate's appearance. Antonio had flat-out refused to wear 'those strange clothes that feel weird' – i.e. a reluctant Lovino's, as Feliciano's had been too small. So he was stuck in the clothes he'd been wearing for literally centuries; thankfully they'd not degraded or got dirty in the lamp, so at least they didn't smell awful. But it was far from ideal. It had taken Lovino hiding it in the cupboard to get him to leave the long, fancy, red coat behind – that would have attracted stranger looks than attaching a beehive to his own head. And Antonio's remaining clothes consisted of a stupidly-ruffled white shirt, suitably frayed at the edges compared to modern hemming, loose dark trousers with what (in Lovino's suspicious opinion) were clearly bloodstains on, and knee-high boots which looked like they'd just stepped out of the wardrobe of a period drama. Lovino was certain it would attract attention, and, as previously mentioned, was quietly pissed off.

At least he wasn't wearing that stupid hat.

Antonio nodded, as a response to Feliciano's point. "There's so many people here! More than my town ever had on a market day, or that time that I went to Madrid, and that was a lot. How many people are there?"

Lovino was very tempted to answer 'lots', just to piss the pirate off to make him see how he felt, but that would going against his personal rule of 'don't annoy the guy who owns a giant axe too much', and he was fairly certain Antonio would shut up faster if given straight answers. "About two and a half million. Something like that."

Antonio gaped. "Wow! And that's only this one city! That's about nearly as much as Spain as a whole!" He put a hand on his chin thoughtfully. "Then, I guess, not now. Where'd they all come from?"

"Ve~, well, when a man and a woman love each other very much, they take off-"

"Feliciano!" Lovino could not believe his brother was about to say what he almost did. Stupid naïve bastard. Lovino was not going to let his sixteen-year-old brother give the talk to a time-displaced pirate captain, especially not in the middle of a bloody park. What kind of irresponsible sibling was he? What kind of crazy brain-dead sibling did he have?

"What?" Feliciano looked confused – genuinely so, like he hadn't realised what was so utterly ridiculous about what he was about to do.

Antonio, unfortunately, was not so put off, and continued his tirade of questions, still with one finger on his chin in an effort to look thoughtful. "So if this is how many people there are in Rome, there must be a lot of people in the world. Are there many big cities are there like this? How many? And how many people are there in the world? I bet it's a lot, like fifty million, maybe more. They'd better be careful, or they're going to start to fall of the edge of the world."

"Answers in order; yes, don't know, and about seven billion," Lovino answered promptly, secretly smirking to himself at Antonio's outdated ideology. He'd forgotten quite how ignorant people were in that time, even with his knowledge of history, and was highly amused that people did actually believe something so utterly silly back then. He was going to have so much fun blowing Antonio's mind with science. It could be revenge for when he annoyed him a lot. Flat-Earth-myths would be first on his list.

Antonio just blinked. "What's a billion?"

Lovino repeated the phrase at him in Spanish, just in case it was a translation problem again. They'd been getting a lot of those. But Antonio still didn't understand the term, and Lovino realised it was quite possibly because numbers that big really didn't exist back then. He was going to have to think a bit more often when speaking to this outdated dullard. Which was annoying, as Lovino liked as many opportunities as possible to turn his brain off.

"A billion is a thousand times a million. Imagine a million people, then get a thousand groups of that, and that's how many a billion is. Like if you build a cube a thousand people high, a thousand people long, and a thousand people deep, you'd have a cube of a billion people."

Antonio didn't reply to this, only stared with those giant glinting emerald eyes of his, blinking quickly as his brain refused to process the information. Obviously Lovino didn't even need a spherical Earth to blow the Spaniard's mind. His brow was furrowed, evidently trying to think of a cube that was a thousand people high. It was hard for Lovino – it must be worse for Antonio, who probably hadn't even met a thousand people in his lifetime. But it was, for the first time that morning, a brilliant, blissful silence, and Lovino decided to take the time to relish it and let the pirate come to terms with things in his own time.

The three strolled across the verdant grass in a bubble of their own content silence, punctuated by Feliciano's perpetual whistling. Lovino was tempted to tell him to shut up, but that just might give Antonio the opportunity to stop thinking about giant mind-blowing numbers and start asking inane questions again, so he didn't, and just kept walking. It was a beautiful warm September day, perfect weather for a Saturday, and people were taking advantage of the weather, even though they'd just had a brilliantly hot summer to enjoy. Families were out in droves, keeping the reins on little kids running chaotically everywhere while trying to enjoy their own day off. The statuesque fountain in the middle was clogged with couples, each in a little pocket of happiness and young love. And the ice-cream stand parked by the path was manned by a short guy with a bushy moustache who was grinning at the amazing business the weather had decided to grant him that day.

So many places where one pirate could screw things up. Lovino was regretting coming already. But the nice day was a drawback. After years in a lamp (although Lovino was fairly certain it had only felt like twelve months at the very most to Antonio, from what he'd been able to tell), Antonio was going to enjoy the out he had been longing for for quite some time. And pirates…well, Lovino guessed they didn't exactly spend their spare time playing football for enjoyment. His gut said that this wasn't going to end well and, as a would-be-chef, he'd learned early to trust what it said.

The teenager cursed his ill luck to himself, silently praying that nothing would go wrong that day.

"What's that?" It seemed that Antonio's period of blissful silence had abruptly ended – he'd spotted the fountain. "It's like a whale and stone had a baby and it filled up with too much water!" He was pointing at the park's centremost water feature – a large marble fountain shaped like a man with far too many large, excited fish and far too few shirts. Water was spurting out of both of the man's hands, and out of the mouths of about a dozen fish, splashing down into a circular pool filled with the shimmering, glinting shapes of about a hundred euros worth of small coins.

Lovino rolled his eyes – an expression he was fairly certain he was going to get very practiced at over the next few days. "It's a fountain, genius. It spurts water into the air. That's about it. It's only supposed to look pretty."

Antonio wound his way around a group of people and approached the marble edge, resting his hands on the waist-high stone. "The water's so clear it's almost see-through. That's so weird. Usually water's a bit dirty, unless it's the sea. Is it meant to sparkle like that? How does it work?"

"I don't fucking-" But Lovino was cut off before he could complete his sentence as the pirate vaulted over the three feet of stone wall and into the fountain's main body of water, completely oblivious to the ankle-deep liquid splashing against his boots. "Hey! Stop that! Get out of there, damn it!" Beside him, Feliciano was giggling madly. He never saw the serious side in anything. Lovino was pissed – it'd only encourage the pirate's stupid behaviour.

"Why?" Antonio asked cheerfully, splashing about in the water with his battered leather boots. "It's just water, it's not going to hurt me~. Wow, it's really been ages since I've been in any kind of water. I missed it so much. I wonder how far it is to the sea?" These last few sentences were said more to himself than to Lovino, but the Italian heard them anyway, and his head was instantly filled with the many, many, ways that Antonio could cause chaos at the seaside.

"Get the fuck out of there!" Lovino snapped at him, trying not to make too much noise. He was certain that half the park was staring at them.

Antonio looked at him, his face a mixture of annoyed and disappointed. "You've not said why, though."

"Because you're not meant to be in there! It's not yours; you can't go in!" Lovino knew even as the words slipped out his mouth that this was the wrong argument. Like property ownership or boundaries were going to stop a pirate from getting what he wanted. They wouldn't have in the sixteenth century, and Antonio knew no better for them to do so now.

"Why?" The inevitable answer.

Oh, fuck. How the hell am I suppose to explain Health and Safety to someone who's probably never even heard of the individual words? Lovino cursed to himself. Cop-out argument time. "'Cos you can't do that nowadays! It's complicated, but if you don't shift your ass you'll get in trouble."

Antonio raised an eyebrow. "But I don't want to get out. And who's exactly going to stop me if I don't want to move? You said there's no soldiers anymore, and I don't see anyone who's dangerous. If only I'd brought my axe…"

Lovino nearly had a heart attack there and then. He'd almost forgotten that weapon of death in the moment, and the gash it had left in the museum wall last night. He was still dreading the call he'd get from his boss over that, even though he'd tried moving a cabinet in front of the damage. He did not, repeat not, want that killer weapon loose in the park in front of a tonne of people. "Oh, dear God, no…"

Antonio just gave him a brilliant grin and winked. Fuck. The bastard had been teasing him at that. Lovino's eyebrow twitched. That was far from a fair play. Didn't that jerk know Lovino was putting his neck on the line for him?

Feliciano laughed further. "Ve~. Let him have his fun, fratello. The worst that'd happen is someone asks us to stop. We won't get in any trouble. He's been shut up for years – it's not so bad that he wants to play in the fountain. Hey, I know! I'll come in too!"

"Feli!" Lovino yelled, but his brother seemed deaf to all common sense and reason as he jumped over the wall and sent up an almighty splash as his trainers hit the water.

"Ah!" Feliciano looked down. "All my socks are wet now. My shoes don't keep water out. Aw."  
"It won't hurt!" Antonio told him cheerfully. "It's nice~."

Feliciano grinned and stuck his hands into the water to splash up a wave. "Ve~! It's so cool and refreshing. And the glittery coins! Can I pick them up?"

"No!" Lovino shouted at him. "You'll ruin your shirt, and your shoes, and your phone, and God knows what else! Stop that and get out, both of you idiots!"

"Or what?" Antonio retorted, still with that stupidly cheerful grin on his face. "I don't see you coming in here to get me."

Fuck, Lovino thought to himself. Antonio was right. If Feliciano wanted to chase a moron across a fountain, that was his problem, but Lovino wasn't going to risk getting his twenty-euro-a-month phone soaking wet. He didn't have insurance on the thing. "No! Get out by yourself! I swear to God I'm never taking you anywhere again. You're not supposed to be in there!"

Antonio grinned even wider, a move Lovino hadn't thought possible. "Oh? Then I guess you won't like me doing this~."

'This', before Lovino had any say in the matter, was sticking both hands into the water and sending a powerful wave straight up, over the fountain's wall and showering a large group of people with water. Several gasped, two girls screamed shrill enough to wake a slumbering dragon, and the rest turned back to see who had the nerve to pull such a stupid move. Feliciano had both hands over his mouth – partly in shock, partly to hide his huge grin – so the culprit was obviously Antonio, who was quite damp, looking right at them and smirking.

"What the hell are you up to, you moron?!" one of the girls snapped at him. "You got my phone wet!"

Antonio winked at her, a gesture which only served to piss Lovino off even more. No pirate should be able to give such a dazzling look. "I'm sorry, señorita," he replied, mostly in accented Italian. "But I had to get your attention somehow~. It's like they say, you have to splash the oyster to get the pearl."

The girl promptly forgot about her water-splattered phone – which Lovino reckoned probably wasn't even damaged – and stared at the floor as her face lit up magenta. Oh no. That guy was not going to pick up chicks – or whatever pirates did – while Lovino was about. Plus that oyster crap was complete and utter bullshit, even if you edited out the poor phrasing from bad translation.

He was about to step in and take control before things got worse, but one of the guys in the splashed group – evidently either a boyfriend or an admirer – was faster off the mark, approaching the edge of the fountain and glaring at Antonio. He was a stocky type, in his late teens, with logo-spattered clothing and tenderly gelled hair. His body language was quite clearly confrontational even if you edited out the glare, which would be rather hard even if you'd used Photoshop. "What the hell, man? Back off, you crazy punk."

But Antonio was seeming rather unnerved by it all; he seemed to be relishing it, in fact. Even if that slight look Lovino spotted betrayed the fact that the Spaniard hadn't completely understood the insult. He seemed to have got the gist of it at any rate. Some guy was shouting at him; he was prepared to fight him. And Lovino did not doubt that, if Antonio had been a pirate like he said, he'd be pretty damn good at it.

This was not good.

Antonio shrugged. "I've not done anything wrong, you know. It's just all in a bit of fun~. It's a nice day, the sun is shining, and we're all out in the fresh air. Feel free to join in anytime."

"Rick, he's just playing," one of the other girls told the confrontational guy. "Don't make a scene out of this like you did last Friday." There was a short laugh among the group at this, and Rick scowled as his face reddened.

"That's totally out of proportion! This idiot's getting all up in Mia's business, and you're just letting him get away with it. You're the guys who're –" Whatever he was about to say was cut off short – while everyone's eyes had been on him, Antonio had snuck up and soaked him from behind with another fountain-wave.

"Now you've gone and done it, you dumbass!" Lovino yelled. "Just apologise, get the fuck out of there, and we can go before you fuck up everything!" As he'd half been expecting, though, Antonio completely ignored every word, and kept smirking at Rick as the stocky teenager glared through the hair plastered to his face.

"You. Asshole." Rick spat. "Prepare for the ass-kicking of a lifetime." He handed his pocket-garbage to one of his buddies, the one who was egging him on, and stepped over the edge into the fountain.

Antonio raised an eyebrow. "Oh, you want to fight? Well, I'd warn that it's not a great idea for you, but you seem pretty insistent." He turned around and – much to Lovino's and the group's shock, broke the tail off one of the stone fish. The pirate tapped it, testing the weight in his hands. "Yeah, this should do."

"Shit," Lovino muttered to himself. Well, it didn't look like there were going to be any more negotiations in this. Violence seemed all but inevitable. "Feli, get out of there! You're not ending up as collateral damage!"

Feliciano didn't need any more encouragement; having lost all enthusiasm for playing in the water, he jumped out as fast as he could and ran back to hide behind his older sibling. All there was left to do was watch as the chaos seemed to be unfolding. Well, there was also run, but Lovino reckoned that would make them suspects number two and three if they did. Oh, and there was also hope to God that Antonio didn't do anything else that was utterly stupid.

"Hey, no weapons, you cheating vandal!" Rick yelled, picking up a handful of coins from the bottom of the pool and throwing them at Antonio, who simply dodged the shower with a smooth duck and a grin.

Antonio straightened up and shrugged. "Alright. But you're still pretty outmatched. If you had a weapon too you'd have a fighting chance is all. But if you want to do this the old-fashioned way, then that's fine by me too."

"You're so dead," Rick growled, hands curling into fists.

"Rick, get out of there!" The original girl – Mia – had handed her bag and shoes to one of her friends and climbed gingerly into the water in an attempt to calm Rick down. Unfortunately for her, he was too busy trying to hit Antonio and collided right into her before either of them could comprehend anything. She tumbled into the pool with a squeal and a splash, and gaped in a strange mirror of one of the fountain's fish sculptures.

"You'll pay for that!" Rick shouted, evidently pinning the blame on Antonio for what was his own fault, and charged headlong at Antonio with a loud yell and fists poised.

The Spaniard waited for a second, then span out of the way with the grace of a matador facing an enraged bull, much to the delight of the sizeable crowd. Rick, with no way to dissipate his forward momentum, managed a strangled cry before smashing headlong into the statue of the shirtless fish-lover-guy. He ended up sat on his butt in the water, looking rather dazed.

Antonio, the showboat, was waving to the crowd, loving the attention after being cooped up for so long. "Gracias, gracias!" He made a sweeping bow and turned back to wink momentarily at Lovino, who had been rendered speechless by the entire ordeal, thinking it had turned out far worse than any of his imagined scenarios.

That was when the statue toppled over.

Cracks had appeared in the base when Antonio first broke off the tail of a fish, which seemed to have been a load-bearing fish, and the final blow to its battered structure had been when the stocky man crashed into it. There was a slight, ominous creak as more cracks appeared, then the base lost its structure entirely, and sent the entire mound of carved stone heading straight into the water. The watching crowd yelled, several filming the scene on their mobiles, although Lovino was careful to keep his face shadowed.

Antonio jumped out of the water just before he got knocked over, his feet only just clearing the wall as he leapt sideways, and he almost landed in a large bed of pansies as he skidded to a halt. "Whoa! It's getting a bit mad here." He was still grinning as he said this, but Lovino was in no mood for dealing with his adrenaline rush. The bastard hadn't even been here for twenty-four hours, and yet he'd managed to demolish several grands' worth of fountain and initiate a fight. No one could create such chaos off the top of their head. People were shouting, arguing, trying to photograph the damage, call the police, and Rick was swearing profusely to one of his friends. Sirens were already beginning to wail in the distance, and Lovino hoped that they weren't bound for here. The Italian had been hoping so hard that something like this wouldn't happen. He was only dreading how it could possibly get worse.

Lovino grabbed him by the sleeve and tugged hard. "Right. That's it! We are going the fuck home, right now, before any cops decide to show up and we get into to biggest fuckload of trouble!"

Antonio protested against the action, somehow not seeing what was so wrong about such a cacophony in the middle of a public park in broad daylight, much less to having been the one to cause it. Goddamned pirates and their immunity to chaos. Lovino kept a tight hold on his sleeve, made sure his other hand was firmly attached to Feliciano's, and dragged the pair straight out of the park as fast as it was possible for him before anyone could notice they'd been involved. Hopefully no one would have associated them with Antonio, if they'd have been recognised at all, and legally, the pirate didn't exist, so if all went well they'd be in the clear. But today was a prime example of how things never, ever, went well if you were hoping them to.

It seemed that God had a sense of humour after all – Lovino was pretty sure he needed to find the guy a better joke book.

XxxxX Sunday

After all the excitement of the previous day, Antonio was rather beginning to like the future. Sure, he still had a lot to learn, but he had Lovino and Feliciano looking out for him – he was beginning to think of the two as his new crew. It was like being back to normal adventures – only the sea was a metaphorical concept of new ideas and technology; helpful, but hard to navigate and potentially very dangerous. And they didn't have a ship. Just themselves, in the big wide world by themselves, facing incredible danger and impossible odds. Perhaps they were an outlaw band instead. Antonio frowned. No, Lovino was insistent that Antonio not break the laws. Why, he didn't know. There didn't seem to be any soldiers about, patrolling for beggars or cutpurses or pirates like himself. Only a couple of blue-jacketed men, to whom Lovino had referred as…polit-zia? They looked relatively harmless. Why Lovino was afraid of what they'd think, Antonio hadn't the foggiest idea.

But Antonio wanted to go back out and explore some more, despite, or perhaps even because of, Lovino's scare-mongering. He knew that there was much that he had to learn about the apartment still, but it was boring being trapped between four walls and staring at everything he wasn't allowed to touch, and he hated being cooped up in places at the best of times. Ships didn't count on that front – they were going to places at the same time. An apartment was the same thing, all the time. Nothing interesting was happening, and Lovino was getting very irritable about having to explain every which thing, especially after Antonio dropped a glass on his foot and shattered it. Antonio wanted to go someplace. There was a whole new world out there for him to explore all over again, and Lovino wouldn't let him leave by himself. Supposedly it was 'dangerous' and 'stupid' to do so. Antonio couldn't see why.

"I said no, bastard, and that's final! Dio, it's like having to deal with a child!"

Hence his current situation – trying to persuade Lovino into taking him someplace. Not the park, not after yesterday was that a good idea, but there had to be dozens of other exciting places to go to. He'd seen so many beautiful and strange buildings. Not all of them could be houses – surely he could visit some of them? What was this world about? What had he missed? He had a brilliant opportunity here – how could he waste it by letting Lovino coop him up in one small flat?

The argument was taking place in Spanish, of course, as it was the language the two were most fluent in conversation between them, but Antonio was still getting used to the differences in the two dialects. Conversation was difficult, but passable.

Antonio shook his head. "Not the park again. Somewhere else. There's so many places about, Lovi! So many places to explore, things to do, people to meet-"

"Things to steal," Lovino interrupted. "I know you're just biding your time, jerk. If you're really the pirate you say you are, why haven't you done anything pirate-ish yet? Well, I'm not going to let you call my bluff, and suddenly my house is filled with stolen goods and I end up in a fucking jail cell! It's not happening!"

"I'm not wanting to steal anything!" Antonio protested. "Just look around! Explore a bit."

"No," Lovino said shortly, glaring at him.

"Why not! Half of what I touch breaks when I do, and the rest is so much of a mystery that I daren't go near it! Your lights come on at a switch – no fire at all. You can create pictures of anything from a metal box. And your buildings are almost touching the sky! How has so much changed? I want to find out. I've got cabin fever here! I don't even know what to do with myself anymore. You say my weapons are outdated, but I can't buy new ones, so I can't go back to being a pirate. I know nothing! And I'm not spending the rest of my life in here just because you're scared of what might happen if I so much as think about taking someone's money. Only that's different too, now. You don't trade in gold – you trade in little rectangles of" – he flapped his hands uselessly as the new word evaded him for a second – "plastic, and that's worth nothing to me. I'm not robbing something worthless; I just want to look. Let me out!"

Lovino raised an eyebrow, but Antonio caught the expression on his face; for half a second, he'd been afraid. "You're going nowhere if you freak out like that. Besides, I've got work to do. I'm not failing just 'cos I've adopted a pirate, damn it!"

"Oh, come on, Lovi!" Antonio cried in exasperation. He couldn't believe the Italian's complete selfishness – and he'd known a fair bit of selfishness in his time. It was just his luck to get landed with someone he couldn't get one with. And his brother was so nice too. "Look, if you're busy you don't even have to go. Feli knows his way about the place. He could come with me and show me around instead."

Lovino stood there, arms akimbo, glaring with those hypnotic eyes of undeterminable colour. For a fraction of a second, he looked more dangerous than anyone Antonio had ever faced down; soldiers, bandits, even Arthur Kirkland drenched in magic. Then the moment passed, and he was just a skinny teenager again, scowling and impatient. "I am not letting Feliciano get arrested because you thought it was ok to step out in front of a car, or go uninvited into someone's house, or pick up something that's not yours. You're not safe out there because you don't know how the world works! I know it's hard, what with you having to get used to a new place, yadda, yadda, yadda, but you've got to face facts. People aren't going to understand what happened to you. And even if they did, they wouldn't care. Best case scenario for you if you tell them is a mental hospital. Worst case, prison. Sooner or later, if you don't calm the fuck down a bit, that's where you're gonna end up. And that's going to land me in a shit-ton of trouble, 'cos for some indeterminable fucking reason, I'm somehow responsible for your ass. So you're going to have to learn to acclimatise."

"Acclimatise?" This was a new word for Antonio. Another one. They'd been popping up all over the place, and that didn't even include all the Italian he was supposed to be learning.

Lovino rolled his eyes. "Fucking hell. Acclimatise. Get used to a new place. Fit in. Belong to. You know. So you act like someone from this century, at least passably."

"What? How the hell is that even possible? Especially if you keep me kept here… But yeah… How? I don't get anything here; how am I supposed to fit in if I don't understand?" Antonio was very conscious of the reverse-argument he was using here, having just protested to go out so that he could get to know the world, but…fitting in? That was a whole different ballgame. He'd never fit in. Anywhere. Even back in his own time, until he'd made a name for himself in piracy, he'd always felt out of place. Now he was even further away from whatever niche in reality that he truly belonged to.

Lovino sighed and wandered off a few paces, staring out of the window. "Look. At the very least, if you got used to this place, you'd feel more comfortable. You'd be happier, at least. Think about it." He glanced backwards at Antonio for half a second, as if about to say something further, but if he was, he decided against it, and wandered off towards his bedroom.

Antonio blinked. That guy was an enigma. Just when Antonio had gotten used to him being foul-mouthed, argumentative, and generally insufferable, he went and displayed a surprisingly sensitive and empathic side, even though it hadn't lasted long. It was confusing. Antonio wasn't used to other people displaying a hidden side – cooped up on a ship as he had been used to, everyone was pretty much laid bare, and no one had any hidden agendas in any case. They just wanted to make money or kill things. Lovino on the other hand…Antonio wasn't the best judge of people, but he seemed to be someone underneath the grumpy, swearing surface as well. And it was what Lovino really thought of him that was important.

That was the worrying thing.

* * *

**Wa-fucking-hey! It's finally complete! About damn time, I hear you say. Yeah. Sorry about that. Shit went down about a week after I uploaded the last one. According to the doc, I now have depression to add to my ever-growing list of problems. And I begin a fuck-ton of exams next week and I'm freaking out. And, to top everything off, I moved back to uni after the holiday, and none of my flatmates seem to be acknowledging my existence. They even nicked my fridge space, and the possibility of talking to them uninvited is fucking scary for me. So yeah. Not good. But it feels good to rant about it a little. **

**But back to the chapter. I made my best effort to get it completed after I realised how long it had been, and I'm not 100% certain that I'm pleased with it, but I've got a lot more ideas for subsequent chapters, so I'm not giving up with writing it. Plus it's already so popular~! The appreciation you guys show really cheers me up, so thanks for that! :) I'll try make it not so long until the next update. **


	5. Chapter 5

Antonio wasn't sure about the concept of Mondays. Apparently they were pretty bad. At least bad enough for Lovino to leave the flat while growling and muttering swear words to himself. Antonio didn't know quite enough gutter-language Italian to translate the sentences. He only caught something about 'going to cause trouble', 'no fucking choice in the matter', and 'going to regret this', none of which made much sense on their own or together. But Antonio himself didn't see how bad Mondays were, or why they caused such discontent. Lovino had departed for 'a goddamn 9am class', and Feliciano to school, which meant they were either richer that Antonio thought, or school was now commonplace, and you were stuck there for longer. And having neither of the two in the flat meant that Antonio had some time to himself, completely unsupervised. So Mondays weren't so bad, surely?

Well, the long list of rules Lovino had given him before leaving didn't help. Antonio wasn't allowed to leave the flat, mess with anything expensive (like he knew what qualified as expensive now), go in Lovino's room, break anything, go outside, talk to anyone (as if there were people to talk to), make lots of noise, or operate anything in the kitchen. He may as well have been asked to become a law-abiding citizen. Lovino hadn't even explained why for half of them. But then, he'd been rather grumpy that morning. He'd improved marginally after coffee (now this substance Antonio knew about and it had drastically improved in taste in a few centuries), but not enough to let Antonio out. He'd been very clear on the 'stay inside' rule. Which wasn't fair, and Antonio was getting rather bored of the place.

He'd tried to kill some time finding out about the objects in the flat for a while, but after a thin, upright black box blared nonsensical pictures and noise at him, a glass vase broke when his fingers slipped, and he'd knocked over a large stack of books and magazines by trying to take one from the bottom of the pile, Antonio gave up trying to self-educate on the modern world. It still made no sense.

One of the problems that came with being a pirate for years was an inability to stick to rules that you hadn't invented yourself to keep your crewmates out of your private rum stash, weapons, and cabin. And it was with remembering this freedom that Antonio realised that he couldn't be bothered to stay in one place all day. It was as much his world as anyone else's, and he was quite happy to go and explore it some more. After all, it would be ages before Lovino would get back. Probably.

Antonio wandered out of Lovino's flat and down the faded grey stairs, wondering to himself about whether the vase was expensive to replace or not. Not that it was really his business. He wasn't going to be the one who'd pay for it, after all. And Lovino had lots of modern-day money. All Antonio had was a few old coins from inside his coat pocket, which were now in his trousers, his axe, a flintlock pistol, three knives, two pieces of flint for starting fires, a myriad of what he guessed were other now-rendered-obsolete little objects, and the clothes he was standing up in. Compared to the treasure he used to own aboard his ship, it was a meagre collection. It was about time he caught a break instead of being forced to stay inside. Perhaps he could find something interesting for himself while he was out.

He crossed the black-tiled floor of the lobby, listening to his footsteps echo in the deserted room, mingling with the roar of traffic from outside. There seemed to be a lot of cars around. Antonio would have put them as the modern-day version of horses, but far more people seemed to have them. People seemed to be a lot richer in the future, if the cars and their amazing houses and mind-blowing technology seemed anything to go by. It was an odd thing to think about. It certainly put his old life in perspective. Robbing merchant ships in an attempt (a successful one too) to get rich seemed oddly pointless if everyone was now rich. Perhaps he just had to try harder.

Regardless, as Antonio pushed open the building's wooden entrance and stepped out into the cobbles of the street beyond, he was getting a feeling of déjà-vu; the old, somewhat familiar sense of adventure and rebellion. Here he was, back in the element he'd been living for almost a decade (before the time-lapse) – breaking rules set on him by people who couldn't be superior, and setting out into the perilous world on an escapade of his own. But this time, he wasn't the feared captain, whose reputation was known in ports and cities worldwide. He was just some guy in slightly odd clothing, not known for anything, and with no idea of what the plan was or where he'd end up next. He almost felt like he was twelve again.

He just wished he knew better Italian – his knowledge of the language was rusty at best, and improving only slightly from having lived with the Vargas brothers for two days. It was hard to get used to a completely altered version of the world when no one could explain what was going on if he got himself stuck somewhere. He'd been used to tangling with people who spoke different languages, but they rarely held a conversation to any degree; it was more of a one-sided crying-for-mercy thing as he was busy relieving them of their valuables. He couldn't really do that here; partly being unfamiliar with the world and its law enforcement, and partly because he still wasn't entirely sure what classed as valuable yet. He'd not seen much in the way of genuine gold and jewels. Metal, yes, glass, yes, shiny things, yes, but all of those had been everywhere, and something which was everywhere tended not to be valuable. It was tricky to think about, and Antonio preferred to assess his situation and not lose his free shelter and food as opposed to grab the first shiny thing he came across. Once he'd got his feel for the place, then he'd try get his way back up the thieves' ladder.

The only thing left now was deciding where to go, but Antonio had just decided to let his sense of direction take control on that. He'd just wander about a bit, explore a few streets, find out a bit about the city until his cabin fever went away. He didn't know when Lovino would be back – he'd said about three o'clock, but of course that had made as much sense to Antonio as if he'd said he was going to hunt a purple-horned squumdink in a rum bottle. So Antonio guessed sundown. He could be back by sundown, easy, and Lovino would never suspect he'd been out at all. Antonio loved that sort of easy freedom and hidden rebellion. Also fighting for freedom and outward rebellion.

He passed a small, white-painted building and a couple of the thin glass-fronted ones Lovino had called shops, and was just about to investigate one on the other side of the street covered in what Antonio had instantly recognised as jewellery when-

"Watch out!"

A loud wail, like a blaring animal, but many times louder, cut through the air as something fiercely grabbed the back of Antonio's shirt. The collar cut into his windpipe, temporarily disabling his breathing as he was jerked backwards. All in that same moment, a large black car zoomed past, buffeting Antonio with passing air; it seemed to be the source of the blaring noise, which lowered smoothly in pitch as it whooshed away into the traffic.

Antonio stepped back, coughing and spluttering, as the grip on his shirt was released and his breath returned, staring at the ton of metal death he'd just narrowly avoided as it sped away. Altogether too late, he remembered being warned by Lovino to look out for those things while crossing the street. Fat lot of good it had done him – he'd completely forgotten. How did people not get hit by those things?

"Whoa! You ought to be more careful, man," said a loud voice behind him. It was an arrogant sort of voice, liberally daubed with an accent Antonio would guess as something Germanic, but he wasn't certain, with his limited knowledge of modern Italian. As Antonio turned, he saw that the voice belonged to one of the strangest-looking men he'd ever come across. The man's head was covered in a mop of unkempt hair like strands of glinting platinum, there was a little yellow bird sat on his shoulder much like how a parrot would perch, his black shirt was covered in a bright gold emblem that couldn't possibly have been embroidered, and his pure crimson eyes were regarding Antonio questioningly. "What?" he said again. "You deaf or something? Didn't your mother ever teach you the whole stop-look-listen dealy?"

He spoke so fast that Antonio had trouble picking out the individual words, much less any of their meaning. But he was barely listening anyway; his mother was not a good topic to dwell on, and it was hard from stopping his mind from going off on a tangent that was best left untouched and unvisited.

"Helloooo? Anyone home?" The silver-haired man dangled a hand in front of Antonio's face as the little bird cheeped and Antonio was harshly brought back to reality.

The Spaniard shook his head as the smile reasserted it on his face. "Ah, sorry. Just thinking a bit. I'm not used to so many cars, that one was a bit of a surprise."

A grin accompanied the silver-haired man's answer. "Word. And Italians can't drive for shit, yanno? No offense to ya, man, but it's all true."

"I'm Spanish," Antonio corrected him. "And I'm not surprised, seeing as how I nearly got hit. Gracias, amigo."

"No problem, dude. I'm Gilbert. Gilbert Beilschmidt, The Awesome Lord of Everything, to give me my full title." His crimson eyes glinted in the sun as he spoke, and the little bird cheeped again.

Ah, this was finally familiar territory, some kind of conversation that made sense. Titles was something Antonio knew well, either in introductions or as trash talk; a measure of what your opponent was worth. "I am Antonio Fernandez Carriedo, Captain of The Crimson Eagle, Scourge of the Mediterranean and famed plunderer of the jewels of Mort the Untouchable."

Gilbert's eyes widened. "Really? No Wat. That's pretty impressive, man. I need to up my game a bit if you can beat me like that. You just invent all that off the top of your head?"

Antonio shook the head in question. "No. I really get called that." His face fell. "At least I used to."

"You mean, like, when you were a kid? A game or something?" Gilbert looked half sceptical, half interested, as if judging whether Antonio was worth listening to further or if he was just mad.

"No. I really used to have a big ship called The Crimson Eagle and go off robbing merchant ships and famous riches. See, there was this guy who was my enemy and he sealed me in a lamp for hundreds of years because I beat him to the treasure of Forlorn Rock, and I got released a few days ago by Lovino, and now I'm in the now instead of when I used to be." Antonio didn't mind explaining his back story to someone. Gilbert seemed like a nice enough guy. Plus he needed more friends in this world, and he wouldn't get them by pretending to be a native. He wouldn't last in the disguise for five seconds, so the truth seemed a bit wiser. He reckoned it would be nice to know more people than just Lovino and Feliciano, good as their company was.

Gilbert blinked. "Say what now?"

"It's a bit like time-travel," Antonio explained. "Or at least that's what Lovino called it. He said it had been something like more than four hundred and fifty years I'd been stuck in the lamp. Even if-"

"Hold up," Gilbert interrupted, raising a hand. "You trying to convince me that you're from the fifteenth-century or whenever? That you're some kind of pirate?"

"Not 'some kind of'," Antonio corrected. "I am a pirate. The best pirate."

"You're shitting me," Gilbert grinned. "This is a prank, right?"

Antonio was too busy being confused by Gilbert's first phrase. To understand a lot of phrases, he had to translate them in his head into Spanish first, and this sentence of Gilbert's was causing him some confusion. "Erm…what? I don't understand how that's possible."

Gilbert grinned. "Not literally, man. I mean, there's no way you're from however-the-way-back in the past. This is a joke, right? How much money you got riding on this thing? A mate bet you fifty euro that you can convince some random jackass you're from the past? C'mon, I got you there, right?" He was still grinning, like this was just a big source of amusement as opposed to a kind of inconvenience.

"What's a euro?" Antonio was suspecting that Gilbert thought he was part of a bet of some kind, but with the dodgy translating he was having to do at the moment, he couldn't be entirely certain. He'd never thought it would be so hard to convince people who he was, though.

"Ok, seriously!" Some of the grin had gone from Gilbert's face, and his little bird was cheeping as if it was trying to decide whether Antonio's face looked like worms. "There's no way you're actually from hundreds of years in the past. Time travel doesn't exist and neither does magic. So concede defeat already and thank the awesome me for saving your sorry ass. Either that or prove what you're saying. Which you can't"

Antonio thought for a second. How did you prove something? Hard evidence, usually items or an eyewitness. Since his eyewitness was currently unavailable, that left an object of some kind. And pretty much everything Antonio had on him was from his time. The coins in his pocket even had a date on, although not the same date he'd left

Gilbert was unimpressed, and handed the coins back after a few seconds' examination. "It says 1562, but these are far too shiny, too new. Clearly fake. I admire your dedication to a bit, but why'd you even get these minted? No point. I thought fake mints only made regular money anyhow."

"You have whole mints for fake money? Really? Can't people tell the difference between the fake ones anymore?" Antonio was intrigued. Forgery had long been a dead-end road to the dungeons or worse, as it was all too easy for people to find a fake coin when shown a real one. Had this changed as well? If so, that would make things very interesting.

Gilbert shrugged. "Duh. What use would they be if they could? You'd get ratted out to the authorities in no time."  
Antonio could guess 'ratted out' from the context, and agreed. "You lost a hand for it, sometimes."

"Ouch," Gilbert remarked. "Not worth it. But I still don't believe you on the time-travel thing. Tell you what. I know this guy, works at a museum and everything, who'd be able to prove you who you are. Unless, of course, you want to give in now and admit you're just trying to fool me."

"I know a guy who works at a museum too!" replied Antonio cheerfully. "He's the one who released me from the lamp that I was stuck in."

Gilbert raised a suspicious eyebrow. "Oh really? What museum?"

"I don't know. I didn't see what it was called. But it was a big building with white pillars in front of it."

"Well that narrows it down," Gilbert huffed. "What's the guy's name? Or is it the friend who's funding this bet?" The silver-haired man seemed quite adamant that this was the case.

"He's called Lovino," Antonio answered. "I forget his other name. Begins with a V."

"Vargas?" Gilbert completed, the suspicious eyebrow from earlier being joined at its height by its mate. "Dark hair, feisty, swears all the time? Dude, that's the guy I know!"

Antonio laughed. "Really? Wow! Does everyone here know each other like that?"

"Nah." Gilbert frowned for a moment in thought, then his face returned to its earlier grin. "Tell you what. 'Vino'll be out until later this afternoon, so how about I go buy you a drink for your efforts to outsmart the awesome me so far. And on the chance your story turns out to be true, maybe I'll buy you another.

Antonio smiled. He didn't know much about the modern world, but drinks, providing it meant the same thing, was something he did understand. "Sounds good to me."

XxxxX

At five minutes past three that afternoon, Lovino's first thought as he surveyed his home wasn't that someone had broken in. More rather…someone had got out. The flat was a mess, at a casual glance as if someone had got in uninvited and searched a bit, but it was all wrong for that upon a closer look.

For one thing, the TV was blaring one of those cheesy daytime talk shows that Lovino generally wouldn't go near with a ten-foot pole. The device hadn't been on when he left, so Lovino was assuming it had gotten turned on by someone who didn't know how to turn it off. Thieves would have just taken it. As another point, the large pile of reading material that he'd been too lazy to put back on the shelves was now all over the floor, perhaps knocked over by accident.

What pissed him off most, though, was his mother's favourite vase, the one she'd painstakingly decorated herself with a delicate pattern of twisting vines and brightly-coloured blooming flowers, was currently lying in at least three pieces on the floor. It wasn't worth a lot in monetary terms, but it was of high emotional value and certainly irreplacable. If that wasn't fixable, Lovino would make sure that whoever was responsible had hell to pay.

Last of all was what was missing. Nothing valuable. Just a slightly warped, completely out-of-his-depth Spanish pirate who'd completely fucking disobeyed every rule he'd been given. Lovino was about to let loose a torrent of muttered swear words, when he realised why things had gone wrong. Only someone exhausted at half-seven on a Monday morning would have been short-sighted enough to think a criminal would have been kept in line by a list of rules. Lovino dreaded how long Antonio had been out for, or what he'd been up to. The fountain incident on Saturday had been bad enough, and he'd been under supervision that time, for the little good it had done. An unhandled pirate could get up to a lot worse.

But, like it or not, it seemed that the Spaniard was currently Lovino's responsibility, until he figured out how the hell he could explain any part of the situation to the right authorities. And that meant going out to find the bastard before things got any worse.

Lovino was guessing he'd have to follow a stream of trouble to do so.

* * *

**A thousand apologies for the length delay in providing this update. But rest assured that this story is not dead. Just a tad sporadic in its updates. I will try to make sure chapter 6 does not take as long, however. **


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